The week has been rough. Not in a dramatic or catastrophic way. Just rough in the quiet, persistent sense that comes from holding too many open loops at once.
I have a lot in motion right now. I launched a new newsletter, Living by Making, which has been both energizing and oddly disorienting. The Common Ground series is still in curation. My Creative Truths Wreck-It style journal series has been sitting patiently, the first volume fully ready to publish, quietly resurfacing this week when a reminder popped back up. My book, Muse Under Siege: Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Perfectionism, is also finished and ready. And alongside all of that, I’m sketching the early framework for a larger ecosystem of content with a working title of Arrive, which circles many of the same pain points creatives face around beginning, momentum, and self-trust.
On paper, this all looks good. It is good. This is not a complaint about abundance. It’s a reflection on what abundance does to us when everything seems ready at once.
A big part of this week’s friction came from learning a new platform for the newsletter. I already have a tech stack that works. One I understand intuitively. One my VA, Mary Faith, understands deeply. We’ve built systems together that feel familiar, efficient, and reliable. After a lot of research, I chose a platform that is very different. In some ways, that difference is a gift. It’s forcing new thinking. New workflows. New mental models. But learning it has been slower than I expected, and that slowness has rubbed directly against an old internal pressure to move quickly, ship efficiently, and keep pace.
Here’s the paradox. I love research. This was, in many ways, a research and ideation week, and that part of it genuinely lit me up. I love learning. Learning new systems is good for my brain in ways we now understand far better than we used to. Novelty, challenge, and sustained attention support cognitive health. They strengthen neural pathways. Curiosity keeps the mind elastic. In that sense, this week should have felt nourishing.
And yet it didn’t. Or at least not entirely.
The reason has less to do with productivity and more to do with tempo.
Muse Under Siege Cover
I like to say I love slow. And I do, mostly. But the truth is more complicated. In my head, I’m a Type A, three-hundred-miles-an-hour, hair-on-fire kind of person. I still identify with that version of myself. The one who can sprint when needed. The one who thrives under pressure. Somewhere deep in my identity lives the belief that speed equals competence.
In reality, I’m something else entirely.
I’m a deep-groove person. I settle into rhythm. I like long arcs and layered thinking. I’m process-oriented far more than I’m production-obsessed, even when I try to convince myself otherwise. I’m almost aggressively anti-hype. I don’t like rushing the work. I don’t like shortcuts that hollow things out. I prefer depth over reach, meaning over metrics.
What this week revealed is that I’m not just choosing slowness. I’m resisting it.
And that distinction matters.
From a neuropsych standpoint, speed feels good in the short term because it feeds dopamine. Quick wins. Task-switching. Checking boxes. Hopping between projects. Each completed action delivers a small reward signal. The brain interprets this as progress, even when the progress is shallow. It creates the sensation of momentum without necessarily creating meaning.
Slowness works differently. Deep work, learning curves, and sustained focus don’t deliver immediate dopamine hits. The reward is delayed. Often ambiguous. Sometimes invisible until much later. This kind of work relies more on patience, trust, and intrinsic motivation than external reinforcement.
There’s also a cognitive cost to constant switching that we tend to underestimate. Every time we move from one platform to another, one tool to another, one half-formed idea to the next, the brain pays a tax. Attention fragments. Mental residue builds. Fatigue sets in faster than it should. What feels like busyness is often just friction. (partially explains constantly being exhausted).
That friction becomes more noticeable with age.
There's a quiet cruelty in the gap between where you are and where you think you should be.
Artist walking
You should have published that book by now. You should be further along. You should be able to learn new software in an afternoon. You should be able to juggle five projects without feeling scattered.
But who decided that timeline? Who set that pace?
Not the work itself. The work doesn’t care if it takes three months or six. It just wants to be made well. Not your body, which is doing its best to keep you healthy, focused, and functional. Not your nervous system, which needs time to integrate, rest, and regulate.
The “should” comes from comparison. And not always comparison to other artists or people you admire, which is how we usually think about it. Sometimes it’s comparison to an older version of yourself, or to an imagined version you believe you’re supposed to be by now. A version that never gets tired, never slows down, never needs extra time to learn something new. A version that moves faster, produces more, and somehow carries no cognitive or physical cost.
That version doesn’t exist. It never did.
What exists is you, right now, doing the work at the pace a human life can actually sustain.
This is where the conversation quietly shifts from productivity into identity.
When we’re younger, we often compensate for inefficiency with energy. We push through fatigue with adrenaline. We tolerate chaos because the body and brain bounce back quickly. Over time, though, that buffer erodes. Not because we’re weaker, but because we’re more honest. The cost of noise becomes harder to ignore. The price of distraction rises.
Aging doesn’t just change what we can do. It changes what we’re willing to tolerate.
That’s not a decline. It’s discernment.
A slower pace often brings clarity. Fewer things feel worth rushing for. The work that matters most demands presence, not speed. The body and mind start asking better questions. Is this necessary? Is this aligned? Is this worth the cost?
This week put me face to face with a tempo mismatch. Not between my goals and my ability, but between who I’ve been telling myself I am and who I actually am now.
The real question isn’t how to speed back up. It’s whether speeding up is even the goal anymore.
How do we balance a slow burn with the reality of getting things done? How do we honor schedules and commitments without betraying the rhythm that keeps the work meaningful? Is urgency always a virtue, or is it sometimes just an unexamined habit we’ve inherited?
For creatives, this question is unavoidable. Making requires presence. It requires attention. It requires space. Rushing the process often produces work that looks finished but feels thin. Staying slow without structure, on the other hand, can quietly turn into avoidance. The work doesn’t need either extreme. It needs a container that respects both depth and reality.
Freight Train on Nebraska Plains
What I’m coming to believe is that pace is seasonal. Research weeks belong to slowness. Learning weeks demand patience. Integration cannot be rushed. Production has its own rightful place, but it was never meant to be constant. One of the great mistakes of modern creative life is trying to live in production mode all the time.
Meaningful making pulses. It expands and contracts. It accelerates and rests. It asks for decisiveness in one season and trust in another. The wisdom isn’t choosing one speed. It’s knowing when to change gears.
A wiser presence doesn’t abandon ambition. It refines it.
If last week was about noticing this tension, this week was about staying with it. Letting it be uncomfortable. Letting slowness teach rather than rushing past the lesson. Letting learning feel awkward without turning it into failure.
Maybe the invitation here isn’t to optimize your pace. Maybe it’s to listen to it. To consider that resistance might be a signal rather than a problem. To ask whether slowing down is not falling behind, but arriving more fully.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion or a neat takeaway. What I have is a growing sense that making at the pace of human life, not platform life, not algorithm life, might be the most radical choice left to us.
And perhaps, at this stage of life, the most faithful one.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Making at the Pace of Human Life