Ninety-day Performance Review
Or what happens when the only thing keeping you occupied is yourself
In all three months of my unemployment I kept turning around this thought in my head: If I strip away everything, what is left?
When I resigned from Globe I didn’t mean for my period of unemployment to be the start of my journey towards self-discovery, I only meant for it to be recovery. Recovery from all the external things that led to a graceful swan-dive in my late 20s: leaving a well-paying, stable, corporate job to loaf around for an indeterminable period of time, with no prospects for employment lined up. I never would have done this before, back when I only spoke in categorical statements. But it’s pretty typical that as the one who spins stories to myself about the how’s and why’s of my life, I’d be the only person capable of spotting the gaps in my own lie.
My work has always been something that propped up my identity: Hi I’m Nadine and I work at Mar Roxas’ campaign/the Office of the Vice President/Ogilvy/FleishmanHillard/ Globe. I enjoy reading and writing in my free time. Over time, I found that I hinged my pride and my sense of value on the work I was doing—which also meant less and less free time to do anything other than work.
At least until last August, and even then, free time was a strange concept to master; I’d made it a habit to keep myself occupied. Even when resting I managed to fool myself into a form of productivity: I may have lain in bed all day, but at least I finished a new book. I blitz through relaxation like it’s a task on my to-do list. All of this reminds me of a tiktok that I saw on my timeline in July and has stayed with me since.
I knew, consciously, that I needed to take a break. But knowing and doing are two very different things, and as the first week of unemployment rolled by I realized that I was quite incapable of sitting still.
The reason I had such difficulty writing this was because the more I thought about it, I realize that I didn’t really rest during the course of my unemployment. At least, not in the traditional sense. I built a new routine around The Artist’s Way, watched all four seasons of Haikyuu!! (and read the manga), and joined a writer’s workshop. The difference from me doing all of this before my unemployment is that this time around, I did whatever I wanted to—and only during my break did I realize that what I want and what I think people expect me to want aren’t the same thing.
So I still made to-do lists of things I wanted to do, just so I didn’t forget. But I was kinder to myself about not checking items off it, or at least I tried to be. Underneath it all was my hidden agenda of figuring out what was left, once I was stripped of pretention. Then, from there, what would I do with it? I knew I couldn’t figure it out in a day, or a week, or a month. So when people asked what I was doing during my break, I’d rattle off my list of things that kept me occupied.
Then, over the next three months, the list morphed into something else entirely.
A protracted version of my to-do list during my period of unemployment: fix the bookshelves, clean out cabinet. Write. Read. Write some more. Play videogames, go for walks. Maybe figure out what the hell you want to do for a living, if that fits into your schedule of disguising occupation with “fun activities.” Rest. Rest. Rest. Lying down isn’t restful, I hate the blank page. I can’t write. I must write. I hate myself for not being able to rest properly. Let’s watch some more Haikyuu!! so that I stop thinking. Keep track of BTS. Turn off social media notifications. Check social media periodically, still. Doom scroll, message friends: is she going to run or do I need to start looking for work outside the country? Wait, scratch that. Stop looking for work. Do better. Make yourself better. You know you can. Go for a walk. Make ten new playlists for the walk so you don’t need to listen to your thoughts. Listening to music is relaxing, isn’t it? Relaxation is basically synonymous to rest, so let me wipe down my desk and take apart my PC to clean out the dust. Now do the keyboard: unfasten each key and scrape down underneath. This is calming. What are you hiding? Write some more. I don’t want to hide. Nobody’s looking except for you.
Haikyuu!! is the first show in the past year or so that captured my attention this significantly. Watching Haikyuu!! felt like falling: I started watching at around eight in the evening and the next thing I knew it was three days later and my eyes were still puffy from crying.
I don’t even like volleyball. Or anime, really.
I was ready to be turned off by the shōnen hero with boundless enthusiasm and the inexplicable ability to succeed at any endeavor he sets his sights on—and true enough, at first I found Hinata almost unbearable. He’s like the noontime sunlight: too bright and hot that it’s painful to be around.
But the show isn’t just about Hinata—or about any single boy who plays volleyball that he crosses paths with. What keeps me coming back to Haikyuu!! is how the story is told, how satisfying and earned all their character arcs are, and how pure and beautiful their passion is.
Throughout the show, various characters emphasize the importance of getting enough rest. At first it came off as strange—why rest when there’s so much to learn, so much to do, so much volleyball to be played? It all comes to a head at a critical moment, and only months after watching and reading did I realize (with mild horror) that the reason I disliked Hinata is because I’m like him and I want to be him.
I want that audacity to do things I want to do. And like him, I need to be constantly reminded that he who climbs the ladder must start at the bottom. There’s always a certain process that must be followed, and the universe has its own internal magic; it’s a matter of starting, keeping at it, and seeing it through. To try and find ways around it only brings you back to square one.
You could write a whole book about people whose lives have been changed by The Artist's Way. Granted, Julia Cameron already kind of did, but two decades later people are still following her strange guidelines and coming out of it feeling like a totally new person, scrubbed clean of self-hatred and desolation.
One of the greatest things I started during my unemployment was the morning pages: three pages of stream of consciousness journaling. It was hard not to feel like the process was self-indulgent; at first it felt less intentional than journaling. My thoughts rarely followed any reason, flitting from one place to another until my pen would catch on a stray phrase that I’d proceed to unpack. Other times my pages were just lists of things. It’s been a month since I’ve finished The Artist’s Way but I still keep doing my pages. I’m on my fourth notebook of the year because of them.
When I had this newsletter in mind, I tried to figure out the best way to write about the experience. What I detest more than anything is people who try and take shortcuts for growth, and The Artist’s Way is a three-month-long process that cannot be sped up (nor should it be). I worried that writing about it would be like starting a Twitter thread of “things I learned from my therapist”—helpful at first glance, but damaging in the long term.
The course helped me find my internal rhythm, helped me take myself apart to face myself—and find more selves of myself to face. It’s always a relief to find that there are new or better ways of doing things, and I didn’t realize that creativity stems from so many things that I’d written off as inessential.
More than anything, The Artist’s Way led me to being quiet with myself. I didn’t think that I ever had a problem taking up space, making myself known, but only when reading and writing did I discover that there was so much of me waiting to be heard.
Over and over, Julia Cameron writes about the importance of filling the well. Everything feeds into the self, which feeds creativity.
A surprising culmination to my three months of unemployment was Jessica Zafra’s Writing Boot Camp: The Craft of Writing. I wasn’t quite sure whether or not to sign up (financial requirements aside). Was it hubris to think that I’d done my ten thousand hours of writing? But my waffling on the decision only made me figure that I did want to give it a shot; it would be my first writing workshop, even if I paid for it. My friends who had taken her previous workshops said that the greatest takeaway is the opportunity to be edited by Jessica, and I figured that if nothing else, I’d be paying someone (not just someone, Jessica Zafra who I read when I was a teenager) to read my work and critique it.
Now imagine my dismay upon our first session when Jessica Zafra said: “This will be my first workshop where I won’t be editing your work.”
The first two sessions felt like I was being forced to sit through a strange form of therapizing; no one was allowed to hide, and Jessica asked pointed questions about our motivations, our feelings. Tips on craft and process were sparse and barely signposted. At times I’d find myself zoning out as she picked people apart. And after the second session, I found myself devastated by the lack of either praise or critique. I could handle being good or bad in her eyes, but I couldn’t bear being mediocre.
Only in the third and final session did it all come together, the necessary motions of the previous discussions coalescing into something magnificent. The prompt for our last session was to choose a song that reminded us of a specific moment in time. Then write about the memory from second person POV in past tense. I had so much fun writing my little story, and it was even more enjoyable to hear everyone else’s, who, by that point, had become familiar to me. It was even better that we could give each other critique and comments.
For my story, Jessica said: “for a memoir on disappointment, this was excellent.” Some of us have gotten together and made a small writing circle, and I’m excited to see where it goes. (I’m undecided on whether or not I’ll share the piece here, but leave a comment if you’d like me to!)
The last session was also, in its own way, serendipitous: it happened on my my first week of employment. It felt like the universe was tying everything up neatly in a bow. Rest, rest, and now face everything with what you’ve learned from the silence.
My Ninety-day Performance Review
Achievements:
Started and finished The Artist’s Way
Meditated
Read x number of books (my 2021 books in review will be my last newsletter for the year)!
Wrote a hell of a lot of things (that will hopefully get published)!
Things to continue & work on:
Go on more walks
Maintain routines
Keep forgiving yourself
Galileo — Paul Tran
I thought I could stop
time by taking apart
the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.
Nothing can keep. Nothing
is kept. Only kept track of. I felt
passing seconds
accumulate like dead calves
in a thunderstorm
of the mind no longer a mind
but a page torn
from the dictionary with the definition of self
effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving
on as if nothing happened.
Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.
Went to work. Went home.
There were parties. Ecstasy.
Hennessy. Dancing
around each other. Bluntness. Blunts
rolled to keep
thought after thought
from roiling
like wind across water—
coercing shapelessness into shape.
I put on my best face.
I was glamour. I was grammar.
Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.
I, too, had been taken apart.
I didn’t want to be
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless
like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.