Annoying af questions
And, I guess regular questions, too, fiiiiiine
Today, write about the answer to a question you get asked all the time.
One I get asked often and cannot stand is “wHen dO yOu sLeEp??” And, I get that it is playful and meant as a weird compliment in a culture that prizes productivity over wellbeing, but it makes my skin crawl. Everything good I’ve ever done in my life is because of sleep not in spite of it and jokes to the contrary feel like they’re piling on this idea that doing things you want to do requires burnout.
On the contrary, doing things we want to do fills us, and profoundly so. What depletes us is doing shit we hate, being insulted by unhinged bosses and shitty pay and snarky coworkers, skipping lunch to attend a meeting that could have been an email, putting everyone’s needs ahead of our own, living by societal “shoulds” instead of what our art-hearts really want, cutting basic human-needs corners when survival-mode demands it, and running on empty instead of being full.
My point is, a question you get asked all the time, especially one that annoys the shit out of you, is quite possibly ripe for things to write about. In this example, I could write about self-care in burnout culture; about real self-care, the kind that allows for a nervous-system reset; not the kind that has been commodified; about flipping the table of “should” and living on your own terms, how “joke” language reinforces unhelpful tropes, and so on. Mine the question, make a list if you like of all the possibilities hanging off the branch of that topic, and see where you land today.
And, depending on where you land and what you end up writing about, you can also consider adding your answer to your website if it helps potential clients understand a thing about your work, transform it into an essay and pitch it, or just write deeply into the idea and give yourself the possibility of gaining greater clarity on the matter.