Month In The Life: April 2024

Thoughts on busyness as a virtue, Baby Reindeer, and a TTPD song ranking.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Month In The Life. If you’re new here and want to catch up on my year, you can check out my MITLs from January, February, and March here. Each one contains a written post full of links and photos and a corresponding hour-long podcast. Listen, read, or do a comb of both. In any case, thank you for being here and for supporting my work. It means the world.

In a lot of ways, April felt like one of the least productive months I’ve had in a long, long time. I spent almost all of it in between writing projects, trying to allow myself to take a break but feeling desperate to keep working on something, unsure what to do with myself if I wasn’t going full throttle trying to hit a deadline, as I had been for the past… oh, let’s say 10 months. I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing more, and then guilty that I found it hard to take the break that was in front of me after so many months of hard work. I hadn’t been on a single trip or vacation in the past year where I wasn’t working (or, in the case of our vacation in January, deathly ill). And yet, I felt… bad. I knew I had spent almost every weekend in March revising, that I had woken up every Saturday morning, made a cup of coffee, walked to my desk, and not left it until dinner time. And yet when I got to April and I found room to relax, I mostly just felt lost. At first, I thought this feeling was because I’m simply better all-around when I’m writing creatively (this is true). But as the month went on and I was still waiting on next steps, I started to realize if maybe there was something else at play. In the end, April turned out to be a huge reminder of just how much I (and maybe all of us, as a society) have cemented busyness as some type of virtue, a moral marker of how to be acceptable and good in the world.