I’m So Lazy, I Can’t Stop Crying

I turn myself into a commodity, a walking list of accomplishments, future goals, prior achievements, lists of things to buy, make, work on, produce. By 2012, I’m working a couple of jobs; by 2016, it’s up to five. Pride comes in the form of journal issues I edit: two, three, up to six a year. How many articles did I publish? My cv is now x pages long, my self-worth inches up with every new thing I “have” to do, every demand that keeps me from creating.

I start to get sick.

Meanwhile, I forsake pleasure, postponing watching the last season of The Wire until I can “enjoy it.” Other pleasurable activities take on the dark sheen of work: if I don’t learn to sew my way out of fast fashion, I am a bad citizen. Didn’t complete this year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge? Bad reader. I justify watching, listening, or reading by pairing it with a workout. I keep journal pages of books read and shows watched complete with a star system and length of time to completion. I am a robot, full of data, lacking in heart.

I send out proposals but my manuscripts become musty. I stop writing for pleasure.

The cancer arrives. I dream of small green monsters crawling into my neck and gnawing at my tissue, scrounging around for morsels. I keep producing. One more issue. One more essay graded. One more denial of opening my heart to November’s falling yellow crunch, the brisk sniff of first snow, of putting these experiences into words on the page.

The anaesthetist puts me to sleep. I count backward for him, only making it to seven, thinking, Thank god no one can ask me to do anything for a little while.

When his memoir came out in 2003, Sting reflected on his father’s death. “I think cancer is the result of undigested dreams and forcing yourself to do something that is not distinctively you.”1

Is it possible that all this time the river has indeed been flowing? I wouldn’t have dared tell anyone I noticed it for fear I’d be caught red handed: lazy; merely observing, not producing. But as Sting suggests, if I keep on this path, all that will be left of my crumbled empire of work is the stones discovered by the workmen. Where is my art? There is no point looking because it doesn’t exist.

Wait. The river is still flowing, moving along to the sea. It is relentless. Like water, my words don’t stop moving just because I put a container around them. They burst through, striking rivulets here and there. No one can see them but me.

Life continues. I wake up from the knife and I’m cured. One by one, I drop my jobs; by the end of 2017, I’m down to one. I write a book, it goes into the world. I write more. I stop. I start again. I stop.

Pressure mounts, the flow ebbs.

I don’t notice that I’ve been tracking the moon, humming phrases of old country songs, watching the gradual drip of the faucet onto my toe in the bathtub. I don’t catch the care with which I bake a loaf of bread or trim my tomato plants, the doodles on my notepad, the half-formed thoughts in margins of books. I forget that I spend the first half-hour of the morning staring at the leaves brushing my window, forming flickers of connection among the words I read the day before, the songs I heard. Rivulets, bursting through the seams of my container.

“If at any given moment, any decision you make is essentially determined by everything that has ever happened to you up to that point . . . this sense of you deciding to do something in the moment is just not true,” says Steven Soderbergh in his discussion of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky. “No creative person wants to be told they didn’t think of something.”2

In September 2023, we go to see Sting in concert. The balm of the day doesn’t lift after the sun sets; his voice drifts, tickling over the crowds to reach us, stirring us from the warm cocoon of air.

Has every day led to this point? The first songs are marked with a creak in his vocals, he is, before us, the culmination of his every experiment and failure and lost opportunity to this moment, as am I. Sting is gentle with his crowd; gratitude seeps around the corners of his inter-song banter. Why aren’t I so gentle with myself?

I’ve been so focused on the product—words on the page—I didn’t notice my creating was already spread all around me. I never stopped, I sublimated. It’s always been there.

Sting ends the concert with “Fragile.” Its hook is a circular, four-bar phrase, descending the neck of the guitar. Be careful, he warns in the lyrics, should we wreak violence upon ourselves and each other? Will the sun cry for us as we do?

Would I demand of others the level of productivity I violently impose on myself?

In the video for “Fragile,” Sting shows us his effort. Partway through the guitar solo, he lifts his hand away, shakes out a cramp, wipes it on his leg. This art, it is not easy, he’s saying. It is not the finished, polished product. He is in it, with it, part of it.

NOTES
1. Emma Brockes, “Sting’s Tale,” The Guardian, November 12, 2003.
2. “Steven Soderbergh on His Year in Reading,” January 12, 2024, in The New York Times Book Review Podcast.

 A writer, editor, and educator, Gillian Turnbull  has edited and written for several music magazines, and has been a contributor to The Walrus, The National Post, and Hazlitt, among other publications. She is the author of the book Sonic Booms: Making Music in an Oil Town.

l. to r.: Gillian Turnbull, Nellwyn Lampert, Christian Smith, Pamela Oakley

Excerpted from “I’m So Lazy, I Can’t Stop Crying” by Gillian Turnbull in Bad Artist edited by Nellwyn Lampert, Pamela Oakley, Christian Smith, and Gillian Turnbull. Copyright © 2024 by the contributors. Reprinted with permission of TouchWood Editions. All rights reserved.

Bad Artist: Creating in a Productivity-Obsessed World publishes on Oct. 1.