I'm Inventing Mostly*
Bandwidth, Headspace, and Creativity
Last Christmas all I talked about was SubStack. I proposed to my family that we “workshop my Substack”. I put SubStack high up on my New Year’s resolutions. I made lists of potential newsletter topics and found ways to introduce SubStack into virtually every conversation. I used the word “brand” in reference to myself. I wouldn’t shut up.
Then I did it and I loved it.
And then I didn’t post anything for nearly six months, which is how I find myself here, chagrined, and writing these words. The hiatus was unintentional. It also wasn’t for lack of ideas. I maintain a long mental list of potential topics, as well as a more concrete set of drafts on my SubStack Dashboard.
Headspace
I know the proximate determinant of my SubStack silence. It’s no mystery. While some folks can multitask, or hold multiple activities in their brains at once, my own brain operates like a train: it can switch across tracks—changing directions, speed, and destination—but it cannot run on more than one track at a time.
This seems to be especially true for creative projects. I can manage at most one at a time. In early May I committed to sewing a baby quilt in advance of the arrival of my first grandchild. I know how to sew, so it wasn’t the learning curve that derailed my brain train. Instead, it was the very real mental challenge of designing a quilt, deciding how to piece the pattern, and then cutting and sewing the various scraps of material into one organised whole. The quilt project expanded to occupy the whole of my brain, weekends, and bedroom.
This sort of work, which I love, is not unlike the piecing together of a narrative arc in an essay: selecting a topic and then organising sentences and paragraphs to stitch neatly together into a coherent and persuasive whole.
By mid-May my brain faced a dilemma—a headspace constraint—to either create with fabric or with words. I chose fabric.
Bandwidth
I don’t want to belabor the point, but it occurs to me that, as a construct, “headspace” is inherently geographical, involving a fixed amount of real estate in my brain that, like real-world land use policy, involves difficult trade-offs and reckoning with opportunity costs. But headspace is also individual. Limits to productivity are framed as personal, internal limits. If I find myself unable to juggle multiple creative projects at once, that is a function of my own brain limitations. Poor brain.
Bandwidth, on the other hand, is a temporally-anchored concept—how much activity flow-through is manageable before the firehose of work is simply too much to digest. Bandwidth more flexibly allows for structural constraints to play a role. If I couldn’t keep up with SubStack, maybe it has something to do with bigger picture challenges and issues.
That’s a bit dramatic. But it didn’t take me five months to sew a quilt. I was done by June and here we are in November. So another explanation for my 5-month gap in writing is simply that I’ve found myself completely overwhelmed. This is also true. My grandchild arrived (hurray!) and this occupied a fair share of my summer bandwidth, both emotional and physical. The real bandwidth hog, though, has been work. I wish I had a better excuse, but the banal reality is that something had to give and that something was SubStack.
It was tempting to frame this entire essay as a SubStack voyage of self-discovery, in which I ascertain—and share with my readers—my hard-won insights into channelling creativity, work-life balance, and WHAT REALLY MATTERS. That’s not the angle that interests me most. What interests me most is the age-old truth that creativity requires space and time, neither of which has been in abundance for me these past several months.
My Mother’s Taxidermy Phase: A Brief Diversion on Hereditary Creativity
Several years back, my mother went through what is sometimes referred to in our family as her “taxidermy phase.” This involved not only learning how to stuff dead animals, but also occasionally collecting promising specimens from the side of the road. I sometimes think about this when my kids are teasing me about my “enthusiasms.”
It’s true that when I get into something, I tend to really get into it. We are still working through my pandemic marmalade phase, as I’ve previously mentioned. And the roller skates from my pre-pandemic Roller Derby phase still get in the way in the utility room. I asked for paints last year for Christmas (this was a mistake, actually). And I stopped sewing regularly, partly because it was entirely incompatible with children, work, and being mentally present within my household. SubStack is a bit like that too: I’ve been grumpy at my family all morning for existing.
My mother has, over the years, gone through not only her taxidermy phase, but also a basket-making phase, a dog-sledding phase, a camping phase, a sewing phase, a crocheting and knitting phase, and a short story writing phase—and these are just the ones I can remember. Sometimes the enthusiasm ends abruptly and sometimes it fades slowly and the remnants remain for the longer term. For example, the days of receiving several knitted blankets a year are over, but she just completed knitting a Christmas stocking for her new great-grandchild. And I know that for her recent birthday, the plan was to go camping and have a party with some old friends, many of whom agreed to the party part but turned down the cold November camping portion of the invitation.
I had two fears in starting my SubStack. The first was that no one would read what I write. The second was that I wouldn’t stick with it—that I’d be intensely interested up until I wasn’t. That I’d be a quitter. The thing about phases is that they come on strong, but then they also end. Otherwise they wouldn’t be phases.
I Am Once Again Asking You to Read My SubStack
Welcome to Practicing Geographer 2.0, in which I’ll still worry about whether you’ll engage with my writing, but will try to worry less about sticking with it…and what that signals about me, my potentially paltry headspace, and my creative capacity.
Bandwidth remains an ongoing challenge. I wish I had advice to offer on that front. I may simply have to publish less regular essays. I’m going to try to be ok with that.
I may also play with shorter, less polished essays from time to time. This is a challenge, but I’m all about character development. SubStack as self-discovery.
Just no one ask me to sew them a quilt!
* a very famous quote from one Hutch the Rabbit