On Hustle Culture: A Writer’s Confession

The other day on a FaceTime call with a writer friend, we were talking about social media. A few months ago, she emailed to check in on me and we began to kindle a writerly friendship that’s evolved into a once-a-week video chat. We talk about our lives, our goals, and what we being a writer means to us both.

When the subject of social media comes up—which it usually does at some point during our calls—I have a lot to say. I haven’t been on Instagram in eleven months and the previous year had similarly disappeared from the platform. Last spring, I also deactivated my Facebook account. I also stopped blogging. A year ago, I all but vanished from the internet.

“I thought, maybe you died,” she said. We both laughed.

It’s a good point. Maybe I died. Maybe I needed a break. Maybe the earth swallowed me whole. How would anyone know? I didn’t make any declaration about leaving. I just deleted the app from my phone and was gone.

I didn’t die, but I went into hiding.

From where I stand today, I can see that none of it made sense. If you were paying any attention to me last year, you saw me writing all the time. I was doing preliminary writing on a memoir, writing on my blog regularly, and writing Instagram posts almost every day. One of my goals for the year was to develop a sustainable writing practice, which now feels laughable because what I was doing was anything but sustainable.

It was hustling, plain and simple.

I had something to prove and I was willing to do anything to prove it. Though, looking at it now, what I was trying to prove isn’t exactly clear. That I could write a book? Show up everywhere? Write at all costs? Start a business (yep, that was on my radar)? Be amazing at everything? That I existed at all?

I was driven, which has always been true. But instead of being driven by the process, by the pure enjoyment of what I was doing, I was driven to do it all and do it the best. The Type-A perfectionist in me was holding me hostage. It was that part of me that believed she could do it all and do it a-hundred-and-ten percent. It was a constant refrain in my head: get everything right, do it the best way, forge ahead at all costs.

It was a race to nowhere.

I was hustling myself to death, trying to do everything just right. I couldn’t keep up. The pace was too fast, and where exactly was I going?

The more I hustled, the crazier I felt, like a person with OCD who can understand logically that the light switch doesn’t need to be flipped ten times before she leaves the room but who isn’t willing to take the risk. She hates doing it, but she can’t stop. I didn’t have OCD, but I did have an irrational fear of slowing down. I was afraid I’d disappear.

And, of course, the irony is that I did disappear, but only because I felt caught in such inner turmoil that I didn’t see any way out. Looking back at my journals from last spring, I struggled with my too-fast pace of constant productivity and my all-too-real need for rest. Sprinkle in some hypocrisy and a few self-destructive behaviors, and you have yourself a shame tornado.

That’s why I went into hiding. Because of shame.

I was ashamed that I was hustling for my worth again. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. Most days, despite my productivity, I struggled with feeling purposeless and hopeless. I couldn’t keep up anymore and all I felt was a deep need to rest. I was burning myself out.

So, I got off social media. Disappeared. Hid.

I didn’t see any other way.

When I was a new mother, we were all just dipping our toes into social media. Facebook and Twitter were still relatively new. Instagram wasn’t yet a part of the lexicon. As a writer, I was regularly using my voice on my tiny blog and building a small network of like-minded women. I was also beginning a slow dance with photography and befriended other amateur photographers on Flickr. Slowly, a group of us came together, following along with each other’s lives.

There was one woman who I admired and followed from afar, a woman who was nearly a decade ahead of me in age and parenthood. One day, she wrote a long post about how she wasn’t looking for more online connections. She said she was happy with the way things were. Shortly after that declaration, she all but disappeared.

Back then, I couldn’t understand. Why would anyone step away from this magical internettery that was connecting us in new ways? Why would she suddenly vanish? All I wanted at that time was to lean in. I was hungry to reconnect with old friends and find new ones who shared common interests. Social media helped me reclaim my creativity and find a sense of belonging online. It was a lifeline.

But here we are, a decade later, and I’m sorting through my own disappearance. A decade later, the internet is different and the pressure, if you’re looking for it, can be intense. Hustle culture is real. People everywhere are hustling their butts off and, for some, it’s paying off. We’re being told to show up regularly and create content for an audience we have to build to get people to pay attention to our work. It’s not enough to be an artist; we must also be businesspeople.

Maybe that’s not true for everyone. Maybe some people are still using social media the same way we were a dozen years ago. Maybe some are resisting the lure of slight fame, the instant feedback, and the pull of a choose-your-own-adventure life. Maybe they don’t want a business or a book deal. Maybe they’re satisfied with their online connections.

Apparently, I’m not one of those people.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people do weird stuff on the internet. I’ve seen people ping-pong around, leaping from one career to the next like swinging across monkey bars. I’ve seen others pretending to have businesses but not actually making any money. I’ve seen people who consider themselves experts with no credentials, writers who have devolved into ‘content creators,’ human beings acting like robots.

The good news of the internet is people can only see what you show them. They don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes unless you decide to show that too, but even then, it’s curated. No one’s showing what’s real because what’s real doesn’t translate well on the interwebs. We’re all faking it, contriving a presence, editing our lives and personalities and expertise.

I don’t mean to undermine any of that. It can be good, all of it. Anything can be good just as much as it can be bad. Social media is a tool. How you use it determines what you make with it.

No, I didn’t die. But I did need rest. I needed time to unwind and unravel all the years of programming I’d absorbed. I needed to figure out what was true for me without all the voices crowding in my head, because they were in my head now, not just online.

When my writer friend emailed me a few months ago, I was still sorting it out. I was in the throes of that shame tornado and couldn’t see a way through. I questioned whether I was meant to be a writer because this all felt too hard. But writing wouldn’t let me go. It’s hardwired into how I process the world and connect the dots I see. All this time, my words kept finding their way onto the page while, at the same time, I resisted them. The shame pressed me down. I finally had to admit I was depressed.

Then this email landed in my inbox and I felt a nudge, enough to clear the fog and lift my head. She was willing to listen to me sort through what happened and offer me something I desperately needed: someone to believe in me.

I didn’t know how badly I needed that.

Getting off social media was easy, but it left me isolated and lonely. I let myself rest but also retreated from everything. The longer I hid, the harder it was to imagine coming back. But what I want, what I’ve wanted all along, is a writing life. I don’t want to live underground feeling awful about myself and hiding from the big, bad world. At some point I had to poke my head up out of my hole and show up, whatever that meant.

Then the world gave me a gift—or I should say another gift, the first being this renewed writerly friendship—and life halted in a pandemic pause. Of course, I wouldn’t have asked for it to happen like this, but I desperately needed to break out of my shame spiral. I needed something to change the rhythm of my life. This was it, this strange and dangerous time, a chance for a do-over. An opportunity.

These last weeks, I’ve done more writing than I’ve done all year. I’ve found clarity about what to do next. I’ve seen that what I’ve done, despite hustling myself to death, was good and that some of what I was experiencing was normal. The muscle memory of a writing life is there and I’m ready to flex it.

I didn’t die but maybe, hopefully, that hustle-yourself-to-death part of me did. Now I’m learning to work quietly in the background, doing the work I feel called to without the urgency to report on it all the time. I hope to establish something new that will help me in the long run, over the course of what I hope is a long, long writing life. Maybe this time I can be gentler with myself. Maybe I can let go of doing it all perfectly and just do it, whatever it might be.