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I realized last night that I’d gotten all caught up in thinking that each post here at You’re Already Ready should be deep and life-changing. And of course, that led to thinking I needed these to be well-written and lyrical. 

Now, you already know this about me. I can write well, and I can write lyrically. 

But mostly, I’m a sturdy writer, and proud of it. 

Sturdiness is great, in both mind and body. I have short legs. In fact, just this morning I stood naked at the kitchen sink, downing that first gorgeous glass of cold water, and my wife exclaimed, “Just look at those short legs!” I tried to be mad at her, but it’s hard to be mad at a simple fact. 

I’m compact. I’m built like I was made to pick potatoes, or berries. My center of gravity is low, and I’m just as comfortable squatting as standing. My body, when it’s working well, is serviceable. It’s functional and durable.

My prose is serviceable, too. It serves a function—it speaks to you. With it, I talk with you. 

I don’t ever want to get on a soap box and wobble out platitudes made of snake oil, words that do nothing but sound like the current trendy thing to say. 

Nope. 

So I’ll tell you a few things that are really, deeply true right now. 

1. Joy hums like bees inside me sometimes. I’m feeling it right now. Slightly dangerous, but capable of making such sweetness. 

2. I can’t live without peanut butter and bananas. Especially when both of these are spread on toasted sourdough. 

3. I’m drinking more coffee lately because someone said I should (I can’t remember who, but it was specifically a health thing) and thank you, Baby Jeebus, because every few years I abandon coffee for other health reasons, and it’s always, always a mistake. 

4. Kamala Harris was sworn in on the morning I started writing this (it sometimes takes me a while to post), and I didn’t see it happen because I was sitting on the couch in my office, trying to figure out what I was feeling, and why it hurt. This had nothing to do with my body, and everything with my heart. 

5. So I wrote a poem in those moments. Here it is. 

For four years,
Hope has been wedged 
between old suitcases
and the box of holiday decorations
we didn’t even bother to 
pull down last year. 
I’m shut like a forgotten tomb.
I’ve forgotten where hope fits.

But she is the key to the rusted lock.
(It hurts to feel the pins move.
Slowly, so slowly,
my soul’s rheumatic lament.) 

Then she starts to sing, and I realize:
I still know every word by heart.

6. Then I went back on the livestream and watched Biden’s speech and heard Amanda Gorman’s poetry and remembered that, yes, art is how we recover. 

6.5 I’ve sold more books in the three weeks of the Biden/Harris term than I have in a very long time. I’m not the only person with more space in their heads for joy and art and books and peanut butter. 

7. Making art is hope made visible. 

8. I finished a terrible first draft of a funny, sweet book on Friday. It’s neither funny nor sweet yet. It’s not even a book. It’s a collection of phrases lying on my office floor twitching their tails hopefully. I’ve promised each one they’ll be in the final version someday, but I know I’m lying to some of them. Please don’t tell them—they’re all so earnest. 

9. Lists, when done right, can also be art. 

10. I am so lucky that I can write this while in bed. My window is open, and I can hear a goldfinch chirping and above it flies the Oakland bird of all seasons, the ever-present black helicopter. 

11. I got tired after getting to number 10, and took a nap, because resting was my One Job at that moment, and I’m only finishing this list a couple of weeks later. Which is also okay. Lists can hold literally anything, hopes and fears, what you need to get at the store, who you’ll be when you grow up, and the reminder to get a smog check which is a bullet journal item that slips from list to list, still undone week after week. 

12. I really need to get that smog check. Doesn’t it seem kind of silly to need a smog check for a SmartCar? I mean, I think our air popper is less green than my car is. 

13. Do people still skip the thirteenth floor when labeling stories in a building? This always seemed rather magical that they were allowed to do it—the thirteenth floor just IS, no matter what you call it. Does pretending it’s not there really make a difference? 

14. I’ve always thought that the number thirteen and black cats are lucky. A black cat crossing your path is really lucky. But my mother always said that a black cat who starts to cross your path and then changes its mind—that’s unlucky. I think mostly because you have a much greater chance of hitting it if it doubles back, right? 

15. Once, when I worked 911, my medics couldn’t find a house where someone was having an asthma attack because the residents had decided their house number wasn’t auspicious and just changed it by simply painting a new number on their house and alerting no one in the city. Everything worked out okay, so I guess they were right to do it. 

16. This. This is what I needed to shake me out of the feeling that You’re Already Ready has to be “good.” It doesn’t. It has to be done, that’s all. What I’m meaning to do is catch moments and string them together, that’s all. Each moment that I hang up is a tiny light, and when they’re all turned on, my soul glows like a million fireflies. 

17. Your soul, too, has the same tendency to glow and brighten the space around you. Why not let that shine today in some very small (or very big) way. It doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect or good. It just has to exist, and only you can make that happen. Use a list, or use a song, or dance your way across the kitchen floor. You’re worthy of hanging those lights for yourself, and you never know exactly what you’ll illuminate. 

The lists within me honor the lists within you, my sweet friend. Now, glow. 

Photo by Kenan Reed on Unsplash

I talked about this in my writer’s email today, but I can’t stop thinking about it. (Yes, this means that you might hear some overlap if you subscribe to that list of writing encouragement. If you’d like to join that list, just go to rachaelherron.com/write.) 

LISTEN HERE:

Let’s talk about goals.

But let’s do it realistically. 

As real people, with messy and hard and beautiful and true lives. 

In January, we all get a lot of this goal talk, don’t we? And I’m as prone to falling for it as anyone else. In late December, my Instagram feed fills up with pictures of various planners because guaran-damn-teed, I’ll click on every single one. I don’t buy any of them. Nope, I’m pretty happy with the system I use—a combo of paper planner and digital journal and GoodNotes for iPad. I duplicate calendars from digital to physical and back again, because I enjoy massaging the edges of my plans, tinkering with how I’ll fill my future blemish-free hours. 

I fuck up those plans every single goddamn time. 

And that’s okay. 

On Not Setting Goals

I had an incredibly illuminating conversation with my wife the other day. I’ve always known she doesn’t set goals for herself, but I finally asked why she didn’t.

Lala said, “I don’t set goals because I miss them, and then I end up feeling like a terrible person. It’s just less painful not to set them.”

I’ve been married to her for almost 15 years, and while, yes, I’d known she didn’t set creative goals, I’d never known this. My eyes wide, I said, “But—but that’s the thing about personal goals! You just move them if you miss them!”

She shook her head. “But you’re not supposed to do that! That’s the whole point of goals!”

I almost fell off the couch at the realization that we looked at goals so differently. “Yeah, sure, they’re helpful, but they’re made to be changed! They’re our goals. We just rejgger them!”

“You can’t do that! That’s cheating!”

Cheating?

I squawked, “IT’S MY GOAL. There’s no such thing as cheating in our creative goals!”

She looked a little dumbfounded, as if she’d found out that gravity didn’t work the way she thought it did. 

So in case you’re feeling a little upside down, too, let me say it even more clearly. 

When you set a goal for yourself that no one’s paying you to do, a goal that will fill your creative spirit, the spirit that makes you glow the brightest, you get to change and adjust that goal anytime you want.

You can do it once a year, or you can do it twice before breakfast. 

When I’m writing, I’m not filling out a time card, billing my working hours to someone who requires that I meet Goal A and Timeline B.

I simply want to write something, and having a goal helps me get closer to it.

Missing the goal? It doesn’t hurt anyone else, and here’s the important part—it shouldn’t hurt you, either. 

In my old life at 911, if I screwed up, someone might die. 

But not meeting my writing goal doesn’t get anyone killed. No one goes to jail. The Goal Police don’t come and put me in Goal Gaol. 😂 *bows*

I love that quote. I also love the phrase “moving the goalposts” even though it’s usually something that’s looked down upon. If you change the target of a process, or the rules of an argument, moving those goalposts is unfair to the players involved. 

However! 

If you’re the only one affected, then moving the goalpost is part of doing your creative work. 

It’s not failure. 

It’s realism. 

All of us, every single one of us, overestimate what we can do in the amount of time we think we can. You are not alone in missing your self-imposed deadlines—indeed, everyone does it.

The planning fallacy is a phenomenon first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. Put simply, it says that people have too much optimism about the time it will take to complete something.

Interestingly, this bias only affects your own tasks, not those of others. You know it’ll take your husband four months to build the new deck, not the weekend he somehow thinks it will. 

But you? You think you can thumbnail your entire comic book by the end of the week. Instead, it takes you three weeks to get four pages done, and you feel like an abject failure because of it. 

Honey, no!

Pick those goalposts up and move those suckers! They look heavy and metallic but honestly, they’re made of styrofoam, and you can move them seven at a time if you want to. (It sure sounds like I’ve never been on a soccer field, doesn’t it? And you’d be RIGHT! The closest I’ve gotten to soccer is watching Ted Lasso in the last week or so, which I highly recommended for sweet, kind TV.) 

Time estimates are hard. 

You will get them wrong, over and over again. 

If you punish yourself, either by beating yourself up when you miss them, or by not setting them at all because you can’t bear that kind of loss, the only person you’re harming is your gorgeous creative self. 

My wife Lala is a web developer for her day job. She says that project managers routinely take time estimates given to them by developers and double them. Personally, I try to add a 30-40% buffer time around what I think I’ll need and I still steamroll over my personal deadlines most of the time. 

Yes, most of time I miss my goals! Not “some” of the time—most of the time.

The exception is that I don’t miss contracted book deadlines. Those I always hit because I’m a professional. But that’s more along the lines of that time card—when someone else is paying us, yes, we hit the goals they set because we have to to keep getting those benjamins. 

But when they’re our creative dreams? 

We’ll miss our goals.  

But we get to move those lightweight pretty little goalposts anytime we want, with—and this is the most important part—NO GUILT. 

Missing your personal deadline means you missed a deadline, like every other creative human who has ever lived. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad painter, or a bad songwriter, or a loser in any way at all. Don’t talk about my friend like that.

Missing a personal goal means you’re human, and creative, and exactly perfect, right now, with no need to fix yourself. 

Me? I was bound and determined to finish the first draft of this book by December 31st. But then I got sick, and I couldn’t do it. (I’m actually feeling a little smug about that. Sickness is a good excuse! Usually I have no excuse other than, “well… I just didn’t get around to it but I did sew this cute dress! And I watched a full season of a Housewives franchise! And I snuggled cats until they wriggled to get away!”)

So now I’m planning on finishing this draft by January 31st. Fingers crossed! But honestly, I won’t break a finger if those crossed digits do no good and I drag this first drafting into February or even March. 

It’s all good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me as a human being when those deadlines go whooshing past. 

It’s not failure.

Moving goalposts means that you’re still working.

The only failure that can happen is if you set the goal, miss it, and never go back to it again because you’re so upset that you didn’t hit it. That’s the failure that hurts. That’s the failure that can smother your creativity. 

And it’s common. You’re not alone if you’re sitting in the shallow end of that pool, your swimsuit getting colder and clammier by the minute. Come on in and dry off, and then–

—Make a new, creative goal. Try to hit it. You’ll get further than if you had no goal at all. Then, if and when you miss your deadline, set a new one! Rejgger that puppy. 

It’s really, truly okay. This is how creativity works. 

You’re doing it exactly right. 

In early February of this year of the pandemic, I went to Austin for a writing conference. There, I had my own hotel room. It was a small con, and I didn’t know many people. Add that to the fact that I’m naturally an introvert, I ended up spending a lot of time in the hotel room by myself. That’s normal for me. I read a whole book. Room service brought me exactly the food I wanted, like the magic that room service is. 

I do regret a few things about that weekend, though. 

First, I regret that I spent time with the cool kids, and my brain let me reach for a joint that blew (ha!) almost two years of sobriety. (I won’t rehash (ha x 2!) that incident here – you already read about it if you’re a Patreon member. But very quickly, weed was never my big problem, and I do still use cannabis for migraines. But I don’t use substances for mental escape/mood regulation anymore, and resetting my sobriety date was a big blow.) 

Second, I simply regret that I spent time socializing at all at that conference. If you’d told me that that weekend would be the last time I’d have a space all to myself for almost a year, I wouldn’t have left the room except to do the teaching I was contractually obligated to do. 

No, screw that, I might have just barricaded myself into my room and pretended I only spoke French if they pounded on my door. 

I came home from that trip three hundred and eighteen days ago. I counted. 

I haven’t been alone since then, except for the rare hour or two when my wife goes grocery shopping. 

When Lala and I got married and moved in together, we had one condition on a house: It had to have three bedrooms, one for us, one for her office, and one for mine. We both don’t just like to be alone, we need it. To make that happen, we bought a tiny bungalow in a rough part of town, but we got those three small rooms. 

Pre-Covid-19, she worked out of the house most days. That gave me enough quiet time. I had weekly band practice that left her alone for long hours, and I left the house often at night, going to meetings and seeing friends. 

Not now. 

Now she’s always an irritated yell away. (I saw a tweet recently that said something like “Marriage is yelling What across the house for the rest of your life.”) 

I also know we’re not unique in not having alone time. It seems like the world of people I love is split neatly into two factions—the single people who would do almost anything (except risk death, sensibly) for a few minutes of full-body contact, and people who aren’t single who’ve been cheek by jowl for almost a year now. We don’t have kids. We’ve been in our bubble, alone, and honestly, it’s been good overall. We’re incredibly privileged—I already worked from home, and her transition to working from home was easy. 

Also, I love her. I’m in love with her. She’s sexy and fun even when she thinks she’s not, and she’s my person and I’m hers. 

Honestly, the fact that we’ve done so well is a big reason we’re moving. Now we know we can go long, long periods of time with no one but each other, without either of us going for the jugular or even a superficial vein. 

And still. The fact that we haven’t had a blow-out-someone-leaves-the-house-crying fight in this last year is purely a product of me not drinking anymore, I know it. I know that I love her more than I ever have. And I also know that she bugs me more than she ever has, too. I’m one hundred percent positive she feels the same way about me. 

But now, right this very second? 

I’m in a borrowed beach house on the coast that belongs to one of my best friends. 

Yesterday, while I was tramping along the cliff edge, watching a storm roll in, I realized (again) that no matter how much I love my lovies and desire to be near them, I need alone time to hear what my soul wants to tell me. 

That sounds pretentious and hippy at the same time (two great tastes that taste great together) but I mean it. 

On my three-hour drive to Sea Ranch yesterday, I listened to Mary Karr talking to Tim Ferris about writing, sobriety, and happiness. She talked about being raised an ardent atheist, but how she’s come to pray in sobriety, because it just…works? She mentioned she listens to her Leanings, which I saw in my head with a capital L. On a bad afternoon, instead of killing herself because she’s such a wreck, she’ll have a Leaning that says, “Make a sandwich. Make the biggest sandwich you can and then eat it.” 

That’s what I use quiet time for. To hear the Leanings of my spirit. To catch the whisper of the Knowing that rises from deep within me, from a place right next door to that place where I’ll house that recommended sandwich. 

Until Sunday, I’m listening to the Leanings. I’ll write when I want to. Read when I want to. Eat what I’m moved to eat even if that’s four bowls of cereal, followed by two red velvet cupcakes, followed by a salad as big as my head. 

There’s no right way of doing it, and much more importantly, perhaps, there’s no wrong way. Sometimes the Leaning tells me to play no-spend poker on my iPad for a while. Sometimes it tells me to knit and watch the Crown. Sometimes it tells me to sit and write with the end goal of helping someone else someday. 

The Leaning reassures me, helps me to answer the insistent voice that shrieks “Who do you think you are, to deserve this?” 

I can freely admit I don’t deserve to spend quiet time at a beach house. Yesterday, I sat on the edge of the world in my sparkle boots and thought exactly that. The storm was whipping up the waves, sending spray twenty feet into the air. The sound was deafening. 

I didn’t fit in—I was so small, on a rock, on the edge of a country I don’t really understand. How did I deserve to sit right there, just when, when so many are… are not able to do the same thing. 

The truth is: I don’t deserve it. 

And at the same time, I do. 

I am the waves. I’m the wind. Someday I’ll return to those things, my particles and energy splitting and dissolving and moving elsewhere. 

Therefore, I belong everywhere. 

I do deserve to be here. I deserve to be exactly who I am. 

I am, frankly, a goddamn miracle. 

And so are you. You deserve to be here. To take up all the space you need. To close the door when you need to, whether that’s physically or mentally, to make room for yourself. 

You deserve to make your art, to name a dream of many and move toward it. 

You belong here. You’re a goddamn miracle, too. 

When I was a young woman, I loved the wearing purple poem. You probably know the one. In the nineties, it was everywhere – there was a collection of stories made into a book we couldn’t keep on the bookstore shelves. There were posters. The Red Hat Society came about because of it. It was the Mary Englebreit of aging gracefully or, really, with joy. 

In case you don’t know it, here it is. 

I’ve been wearing purple, metaphorically, all my life, but sometimes it was hidden. I made sure that I could see those bright flashes of myself, but I didn’t trust very many others to understand.

During the time of hiding my purple, I dated a man for a while who lived on the other side of a tunnel from me.

On my side of the tunnel was a whole world in all its many flavors. Where I lived, there were taco trucks and cars with bumpers secured with bungee cords and punks who squatted with other punks who loved metal-bluegrass and families with young children who painted with chalk that left the sidewalks and brought their flowers and rainbows onto the streets themselves.

On my side of the tunnel were people shouting and rejoicing out open windows. I could hear three different kinds of music in my backyard, strains of mariachi mingling with soul mixed with a touch of opera. People drove Jaguars and fixies and scrapers and longboards and shopping carts and Ford Pintos.

On his side of the tunnel were gates. Gated communities, he said, were safe. The walls were all gray (except he called them eggshell and pewter and smoke). 

If safety felt like the color gray, I wanted red and yellow and orange and blue and the muddy mix they make when it rains. 

I broke up with him because of that tunnel, because of the way I lost myself when I went through it. He wanted to put me behind a gate, to keep me safe. 

But I wanted to leap. To stretch my arms for things out of my reach. Even if I couldn’t pull what I wanted off the shelf, I wanted the item I desired to tremble as my fingertips brushed it—I’d get there one day. I’d pull it down eventually. 

The other day, I painted my old black Frye boots silver. They’d come slightly sparkly when I’d bought them, actually. They were the gated-community version of silver. They glinted in the light, but only politely, only if you took the time to look. 

The silver wore off, though, and while they become my favorite, most comfortable shoe, I missed their sparkle. So I bought a pot of leather paint and took out an old paintbrush and now they are SILVER. They don’t glow – they sparkle. They are vivacious. They greet guests at the door and ply them with liquor even before they step across the threshold. As I stomp my merry stomp, they leave dazzlings of glitter behind. They do not apologize for their joy, for their full-throated shout of pleasure. 

They are even better than purple.

Back in my early twenties, I didn’t know the poem’s title. We just called it the “wearing purple” poem, and it was a shorthand for what we wanted to be someday—free, confident, and most of all, ourselves. 

The title is actually: WARNING. A British poet named Jenny Joseph wrote it in 1961, and it was voted Britain’s most loved post-war poem in 1996. 

But it’s more than just a fun poem about a woman wearing her slippers in the rain (a thing I did yesterday, actually). 

It’s a WARNING about a woman who is about to stop apologizing for being exactly what she wants to be. 

I think Jenny Joseph would approve of my assertively glittering boots. But isn’t that point? I’m not asking her. Or anyone. 

I’m just letting my luminescent feet dance my legs to where I want most to go. 

In the spirit of old times, here’s an actual finished sweater, hot off the needles! Here are the Ravelry details.

Please forgive my styling and ponytail wake-up hair – I was tugging at sweater in front of the mirror, trying to decide how to best wear it, and then I realized there was only one answer: with lipstick. Damn the rest.

I loved making it – SUPER easy and mindless, perfect pandemic knitting. It is, however, almost impossible to photograph. Here are my best attempts.

Yep. Already covered with Clementine hair, even freshly bathed and blocked.

And where it is at this exact moment (at least his hair won’t show):