Paying the Mortgage

By Austin Conrad

This past March, I pulled off something many indie authors dream of: I paid my mortgage with the month's royalties. Yet I wasn't filled with joy. I didn't feel proud of my accomplishments, my work. Worries digging away in my head undermined the pride I deserved to feel.

Anxiety is insidiously difficult to handle, but it’s so damn useful. Overthinking projects, deadlines, and ideas insists that I keep moving forward, moving onward. It supports personal ambitions by orienting me to the future and reminding me to complete my work—or so my anxiety claims. The truth is that this “overthinking” is more akin to running on a treadmill than running to a destination. I think about my goals and the path forward that will achieve them. And then I think that again. And yet again. And again. Again.

Writing primarily in the tabletop roleplaying games industry, I'm keenly aware that this field is not—and likely will never be—a path to wealth. Heck, even just being a path to prosperity and stability holds long odds. After submitting the mortgage payment my first thought wasn't “Wow!” It was “OK, but what about the next one?”  For a bit over a year, I've strived to make writing my full-time income. Paying this bill was concrete evidence of progress.

Stress, worry, and anxiety feel like they drive us to succeed, to achieve our goals, or to avoid a negative consequence. But when we always feel stressed, it becomes our default mental state. And as a result, we keep running on the treadmill long after the gym's closing time. This struggle with compartmentalizing our working minds reduces our ability to rest, and our ability to get things done when it is time to work. We're no longer incentivized by deadlines—or personal goals. Our priorities shift from “finish this particular task” to “try to do everything all at once yesterday.”

These feelings instigate negative self-talk in my head. They insist that I downplay the quality of my work, the value of my successes. Anxiety feeds itself by emphasizing my failures, keeping me stressed. The treadmill keeps running, moving nowhere instead of moving forward. It becomes harder to move forward even if my brain's sprinting on the treadmill. The anxious thoughts plow the same furrow again and again, deeper and deeper, creating a mental habit which is ever more difficult to break.

I suspect writers—especially storytelling writers—are particularly vulnerable to anxiety. We romanticize this idea that a writer, a real writer, lives and breathes in their work. The work comes “alive,” the characters “speak to” the author, they “act on their own.” The ideal writer never takes time off, never leaves the office, because their office is everywhere. They're watching how parents handle children at the grocery store, memorizing strangers' faces in the airport, always writing even while away from the desk.

Sound familiar?

This mythical literary paragon has no boundary between their work life and their personal life, between labor and pleasure. Glorifying this image encourages us to pursue it. The problem is that kind of life just isn't healthy. Distinctions between work and play, home and office, are necessary for managing our minds.
Establishing good boundaries is an important step in getting anxiety under control.  While most discussions of boundaries focus on the external (like telling a supervisor not to text you on the weekend), this type of boundary is internal. Keeping a firm boundary between “working time” and “personal time” is how we unplug that treadmill. Giving the mind adequate rest improves the quantity and quality of energy we have during our “working time.” It also starves the treadmill's power by weaning us off the urge to constantly move forward. Re-establishing a distinction between “stressed” and “relaxed,” or between “tension” and “release,” helps both states be more meaningful. Psychologically we're inclined to recognize differences in our surroundings and our minds. Constant tension exhausts us, and constant release bores us. We need both.

For me, using an alarm is key to maintaining good work boundaries. I need to not just say “I'll try to stop working at such-and-such time,” but rather force myself to stop. Put it down, turn off the desktop, leave the office, and go do something else. Setting an alarm helps remind me that it's time to be done. The physical act of standing up to turn it off breaks me out of my working pattern. Building perceptual, tangible cues into my daily routine helps me compartmentalize when I'm working, and when I'm not. Simply “be aware of boundaries” isn't actually a stress-management plan. It's a goal. These structures I've added to my day are the plan because they're easy to follow through on and they're physically obvious. Trying to construct boundaries purely from mental structures failed repeatedly because those boundaries existed inside my stressed mind. They simply became part of the treadmill, rather than a power switch attempting to say when the treadmill is turned on, and when it's turned off.

One of my golden rules is that anyone who tells you “here's an easy trick” is full of crap. That's true here, too. Building boundaries helps manage anxiety and stress, but there's no single way to do it. A method that works for me might not work for you. Experiment with different surroundings and routines until you find one which works for you.

The end goal isn't just less time on the treadmill. Forcing myself to take more time outside the office had a concrete improvement in my productivity. Good boundaries help me work less and get more done. Instead of worrying about next month's mortgage, I'm able to stay focused on the work which might pay for it.

Austin is a freelance writer, editor, and graphic designer. In a prior life, he spent seven years as a counselor at a residential treatment center for juvenile delinquents. Nowadays he mostly works in the tabletop games industry. He's best known for his indie publications for RuneQuest. His most recent release is Treasures of Glorantha 2: Relics of the Second Age, a compendium of lost artifacts from RuneQuest's age of god-manipulating sorcerers and imperial dragons. You can learn more about Austin's work on Facebook or on his website, akhelas.com.