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(Full episode transcript below show notes)
We’re often told that our limitations are something we should just push through — that hard work and determination can overcome anything. But… what happens when you run into a limitation that, despite your best efforts, you genuinely can’t overcome?
This was a hard episode to work through, and in it, I tried to be as honest and transparent as possible. You’ll hear about my own limitations as a writer, why I’ve spent so long fighting them, and what I’m slowly (s l o w w w w l y) learning about giving myself forgiveness and grace.
Resources & Links:
- “Give Yourself Some Grace” — Write Now Podcast #038
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, episode 172, “Hitting Our Limits.” Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And today I want to talk about human limitations, specifically our own.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for years, but at this point in my life, I need to rethink how I’m thinking about them. So first and foremost, what do I mean by human limitations? In the context of today’s podcast episode, I’m talking about the things that we can’t do for any number of reasons. So I want to write 36 hours per day, but the limitation is there are only 24 hours in a day, and another limitation is the human body has to sleep, rest, and recharge for some of those 24 hours.
(01:30):
Unless you’re a college student — I see you trying to stay up 24 hours, 36 hours. I see you. Another example: I would love to come out with a new audio drama season every year for whatever show I’m working on, or I would love to come out with a novel every year. To me, that sounds great, but this is not something I have been able to do, even when I push myself, and therein lies my frustration. I am — as you may know, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any amount of time — a very slow writer. My ideas come in slow. I’m slow to mentally digest them. I write things by hand. I’m maybe a little bit of a perfectionist. I have a limited amount of working memory, and all of these factors together have meant — I’m not going to say this is always going to be the case, but historically what I have shown to myself is that I am not able to write a full novel or a full season of an audio drama in one year.
(02:42):
This is very frustrating because I don’t want that to be true. And over decades of school and career, I feel like when you’re successful at something, you’re successful at it because you are able to overcome your limitations. Now, I know that’s not the only road to success, but I want to talk about it just for a little bit here. I live in the United States, and so I’m going to be making some generalizations about society — the society that applies to where I live — and this may or may not apply to wherever it is you’re listening from. I think that societies that focus on individualism, or see a lot of value in the individual, tend to focus on us being more than just an individual. So pushing ourselves beyond our limitations, doing more work than one person can handle, is applauded. A company I used to work for would call out and celebrate people who answered client calls during their off hours…
(03:53):
2:00, 3:00 in the morning, they would get recognized publicly for going above and beyond. And ostensibly, what they’re going above and beyond are the expectations that the company has set for its workers. This proves that you are a hard worker, a valuable employee, and your workplace loves this because you’re doing all of this extra work that they’re not paying you for. The expectations that are set by the company — or if we’re taking a broader look at things, the expectations set by your workplace, the expectations set by the school that you attend, the expectations set by your family or other community — those expectations exist as a sort of bar. You need to meet expectations, so you need to perform your job duties according to your job description. You are expected to get a C in math or biology or English, and if you don’t meet those expectations, you will often be met with some sort of consequence.
(04:58):
But if you’re anything like me, simply meeting expectations was never good enough. I wanted to push myself. I always wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to learn more and do more. Whenever I got a report card or a performance review at work, I wanted it to say Sarah goes above and beyond expectations. I want to see an A or an A+, and I’m going to do that extra credit assignment to see if I can get something higher than an A+. I wanted to be the shining employee that everyone looked up to. I wanted to set a good example. I wanted to make something of myself — something brilliant and amazing in the corporate world. And for the most part, I was successful in that. I got the A or the A+. I got my annual raise. Did I necessarily need to in order to survive?
(05:55):
No, not necessarily. Not at all. I could have done a perfectly adequate job, gotten Cs in school or a “meets expectations” on a performance review, and not blown up or died or anything dramatic like that. There was just a value placed on going above and beyond those expectations. Just as if you fall beneath those expectations there are consequences, if you go above and beyond those expectations, there are often rewards. Maybe you get publicly called out in a good way in a meeting for answering a client call at two in the morning, and you get social cred for that — admiration from your boss and your peers. Maybe you get a promotion or a raise at work. Maybe if you’re in school, you get a pizza party. If you can do the most pull-ups in gym, or if you can run the mile faster than anyone else, you earn people’s respect; people look up to you.
(06:56):
You’re seen as a winner, and it feels good to be a winner. So subtly — or perhaps less than subtly — we are taught to see expectations as bars that we can jump over, and any limitations we happen to run into, we start to figure out ways to climb over them or break through them or dig under them. We learn how to mitigate limitations. We learn how to bypass them, if not surpass them. And again, we are rewarded in some way for doing so. And this is not a bad thing. I want to say that loud and clear. I am an achiever. I love achieving things. It makes me feel good to achieve and create and just do cool things in the world, and that is not a problem. So if you’re like that, if you’re like me and you like to get the A+ on the assignment, you like to get the “exceeds” or “goes above and beyond” on your work review, perfect.
(08:04):
There’s nothing wrong with that. This is how our civilization grows and moves forward — people pushing at limitations. But this does not apparently, as I am learning, apply to all limitations. I have a tendency to see my own limitations as puzzles to work out or problems to solve, broken pieces of myself to fix. I overcome problems by setting goals and working hard toward those goals and finally achieving them. Again, nothing wrong with that. But then sometimes you run into things that you genuinely cannot do, and it’s really hard to tell the difference. The example I shared earlier — of wanting to write an entire novel, or write and produce a season of an audio drama, in the space of one year — is an example of this. I look around and I see other creators like myself coming out with a new book or a new show seemingly always, all the time. Everyone always seems like they are creating cool new stuff, and it’s very easy to say, “I should be able to do that.
(09:22):
I’m going to figure out how to do that. I’m going to map out the steps, the number of words I need to write every day. What does it take to make that happen?” And to some degree it works. Some goals I can keep up with and achieve, but other goals — despite setting them and despite having a can-do attitude — I miss them. I fall short of them. I’ve been self-employed as a writer now for, oh my gosh, almost 10 years, and I am just now coming to terms with the fact that I can only write — like, deep focus writing — for four hours a day maximum. I feel like the expectation is of course eight hours, and I can get an eight-hour productive writing day if I don’t do a full eight hours of hard focused writing the day before, if I have a day off in there somewhere.
(10:24):
But I have found that writing every single day I cannot — and I know people don’t like the words “can” and “can’t,” but I have found that this is simply a limitation of mine. I cannot write and maintain my focus and my energy for more than four hours. I feel like I’m confessing something. I feel like I’m not like Stephen King. I can’t sit down for 12 hours a day and just pour out inspired words. I get worn out. My focus gets drained. My brain gets tired. My eyes get bloodshot, and after about four hours I have to stop for the day. And I hate it because I don’t want to stop. But I have learned over the last 10 years that if I push myself to write six hours every day or eight hours every day, that is how I get burned out. You put in extra work, you push yourself, and then your body crashes.
(11:24):
I have learned that if I want to write consistently, if I want to work on the projects that matter to me every single day, I need to stop at four hours. Do I want to stop? No. Has my body taught me that I need to stop, or I will be less creative and less productive in future sessions? Yes. Do I like it? No, I hate it, but it’s true. Here’s another example of what I’m talking about. I wear glasses. I’ve worn glasses for decades. My eyes are not great, and I have one eye that is nearsighted and one eye that is farsighted, and it’s just a whole thing. And I go into the eye doctor whenever Tim — my husband and creative partner — notices that I’m squinting to see things even while I’m wearing my glasses. So that happened this year, and I made an eye doctor appointment, and my eye doctor said, “Well, Sarah, it’s that time.” By which he meant I am at the age now where I need progressive lenses — a.k.a. bifocals, essentially.
(12:31):
And I remember arguing with the eye doctor, and I told him, “Wait a minute, I’ve been wearing glasses now for decades and they’re called corrective lenses. Aren’t they supposed to correct your vision?” And of course, yes, the glasses correct your vision when you are wearing them, but they don’t, like, fix your eyeballs apparently. And he told me that probably my eyesight was going to continue to get worse as I age. Do you know what I felt when he said that? I honestly felt like a failure. I felt like I hadn’t done something good enough to fix my vision, which, looking at it right now objectively, is very silly. I didn’t get LASIK. I mean, my eyes are not going to just magically get better. That’s something that is outside of my control. But I remember that feeling — it was a twist in my gut, like, “Oh, I’m going to have to get thicker and thicker glasses.
(13:33):
This isn’t something I can overcome. I have a lot of willpower. This isn’t something that I can just grit my teeth and do.” At the end of last year, I had a spinal surgery — which if you’ve been listening to the show you know all about, so I won’t bore you with the details — but after my surgery, I found myself getting frustrated with how slowly my body was healing. I think internally I had set some kind of goal, like, “I’m going to recover from this the fastest anyone has ever recovered,” or something like that. And as the days went by, as I continued to have to rebandage, as I continued to have to regain my strength and walk and do these things that used to be so easy, I was not only getting frustrated with myself, I was angry at myself. My whole life, my whole career, I’ve been the person who pushes past their discomfort and stays up a little bit later and goes the extra mile to make sure things are better, and that philosophy did not apply in this case.
(14:50):
Is there a little bit of impatience going on there? Yes, definitely. I’ve said before, patience is not one of my virtues. Is there a little bit of unrealistic thinking going on there? Absolutely. But it still comes as a punch to the gut when I realize there is something that I cannot do, because I’ve been taught that the way to continually grow and be a better and better person is to overcome limitations. I think it’s even tied to my self-worth — like, I’m worth more if I can do X number of things in a day, and I am worth less; my value as a person is less if I can do fewer of those things. Now, this is actually insane. Okay, I shouldn’t say it that way, but you can see where I may have been a little bit ridiculous. Sure, I can take care of myself while I heal.
(15:49):
I can take my medications. I can go for daily walks. I can stretch. I can do all of the things the doctors recommend. I can wear my glasses — corrective lenses. I can write as long as my brain can write and focus as long as my brain can focus, and I can get good sleep and I can hydrate and I can eat nutritious foods and I can meditate and I can read. But I can’t do more work than I can do. I struggled with this for a really long time. I did not want to accept that I could only write for four hours a day. I wanted to find a way to make that not true because, if you dream it, you can do it, right? And everything is possible — except some things are not possible. I really, really, really want to be able to fly, but unfortunately that is a human limitation that I must contend with.
(16:52):
One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this with you today was that I’m also learning that our limitations can change. I’ve been talking about this with my friend Maggie about how I feel more tired than usual, how I used to be able to push past so many more limitations. I look back at when I was working full-time, 10-plus years ago, and I would wake up at like five in the morning, I would write, I would go to work, I would do a full workday. I would go grocery shopping over my lunch. I would go home, and then after work I would have a church meeting, or I would have a book club or a writing group that I would lead, and I did that every day for years. And I feel like today, if I had to do that, I would explode or die in some horrible way. And maybe part of it is — if you do it enough, you get acclimated to it, you get used to it.
(17:52):
So maybe that’s part of it. But I also can’t help but feel like I have somehow lost something. Something about me has diminished, and going back to what we were talking about before, like I have failed in some way. I have failed to keep growing and striving and pushing and doing my best. Well, I’m still doing my best. I can confidently say from my heart that I am doing the very best I can with the energy that I have and the time that I have and the projects that I’m working on. And that’s frustrating too — when you realize that sometimes doing the best that you can do is still not enough to make you feel successful. Doing the best that you can do, given your circumstances or whatever it is you’re going through — doing your best can be less than you want it to be.
(18:48):
I was in this always-growing, always-improving sort of mindset. Perhaps like you, I do a lot of self-improvement stuff. I’m always challenging myself. I’m always making sure that I’m not resting on my laurels, and I thought — perhaps naively — that it would be like that forever, and that when I hit 20 years in the future, I’d be writing two books a year. But that’s kind of like these companies now that think they can increase their profits year over year over year before something breaks. It can’t be always up, never look back, as much as we want it to be. And I think that along with that realization is the understanding that we need to be forgiving of ourselves and gracious to ourselves. I have an old episode of the Write Now podcast from probably nine or 10 years ago now that’s called “Give Yourself Some Grace.”
(19:50):
And I think back when I recorded that episode, I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about, or I wasn’t in a place where I desperately needed to give myself grace like I do now. Maybe back then, when I had more energy, when I was doing more things, when the world felt less oppressive and complicated, I would maybe not live all the way up to something, but I’d still be largely most of the way there. But today I have to learn to give myself grace, because going above and beyond the expectation often means doing the work of two or three or more people. I know that we live in a society with very fervent individualism, and I know that we’re all hugely capable of amazing things. I don’t want you to doubt that for a second. But the amount that we can produce with the energy that our bodies have in any given time and situation is limited.
(20:54):
And if you find yourself bumping up against some sort of limitation — if you want to write for eight hours a day every day, but you realize at six hours in that your brain has turned to mashed potatoes — then you have to assess: what does this limitation mean? What does this limitation say? I encourage you to examine it. Instead of — as I was wanting to do — blindly just pushing past or pushing through it and then later on burning yourself out and causing more harm than good, just examine that limitation that you’re hitting. And if it seems reasonable and realistic to you to push a little bit past it, to just push back a little bit, then do that. But if after a while you find that you’re pushing back and it’s pushing back even harder and you’re hitting burnout, then maybe it’s time to take out your journal and write down: what do you believe is expected of you in this situation?
(21:56):
And then I want you to think, who or what set that expectation? Where am I getting this from? Do I expect that I should be able to write for 12 hours a day every day because I am comparing myself to Stephen King? Or is that something I should be able to reasonably do? And if you find that you have hit one of your limits, and if you find yourself feeling frustration or even anger at yourself, if you find yourself feeling like you are a failure because you can’t do a certain thing that you wanted to be able to do, or you can’t do it to the degree that you wanted to, then I would encourage you to give yourself some grace. And I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard because in addition to being taught that we are individuals — at least here in the United States — we are also sort of encouraged to think that we are all like above average or exceptional, and that we should be able to do more than everyone else around us.
(23:02):
We should be better than everyone else around us. And so I try to remember that — I give myself, well, I try to give myself grace — and I say, “Sarah, you’re just one person.” And there’s this little voice in the back of my head that says, “Yeah, so you should be able to do the work of more than one person. Come on. You’ve been working at this your whole life. What’s wrong with you?” So that’s the part that I need to work on personally right now: actually giving myself grace and forgiving myself for not being this production machine. And I have to think, maybe I haven’t lost anything. Maybe I haven’t diminished. Maybe I am just in a place where I can better see who I am and what it is I’m supposed to create. Maybe I’m actually listening to my body for once, instead of just ignoring all of the warning signs and pushing through.
(24:03):
This — this whole giving myself grace, this whole acceptance thing, understanding what it is I need to accept and what I can’t accept and what I want to continue fighting against — this is the work I think that I will be doing for the next several months. If you’d like to join me in this, I would love to have you along for the ride. Let me know in the comments for today’s episode where you are with pushing yourself, with pumping the brakes, with accepting yourself, with all of that stuff that we’ve talked about today. I think it would be helpful to hear your perspective. I think it would help everyone if we all saw each other’s perspectives. So I encourage you: go out to sarahwerner.com — that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com — and navigate to this episode. There will also be a link to this episode in the show notes, and all the way at the bottom of the show notes page on my website, you’ll find a place where you can type and submit comments.
(25:12):
So I would love to hear from you there about what you’ve learned about yourself and your own limitations and your own personal growth, and what you expect for yourself today and in the future. As you may know, this podcast is supported by donations from the wonderful folks — including, perhaps, yourself — who donate on patreon.com. If you would like to support this podcast, if you would like to support the work that I’m doing here, then I would encourage you to join. Pledges used to be per episode, and Patreon has changed over the years, and so now pledges are monthly. You can give a dollar per month, $2 per month, whatever you feel is right for you. And if that is zero — if you are struggling right now, like so many people are — the best thing that you can do that doesn’t cost any money is just word of mouth: tell someone else about the Write Now podcast. That really is truly helpful.
(26:15):
Special thanks go out to patrons Regina Calabrese, Lori, Read Write Ignite, Whitney MacGruder, Mike Tefft, Amber Fratesi, Tiffany Joyner, Poppy Brown, Kim, and Andrea Bertetti. Thank you all so, so much for your kind and generous donations to this show. We reach a global audience and I am so grateful for your help in making that happen. Thank you. And with that, this has been the Write Now Podcast — the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I am going to work on giving myself some grace.