Ep 3: Turns Out, I Need My Own Podcast

I built a podcast called I Used to Be Fun about reclaiming creativity, play, and joy. So you'd think I'd be great at actually choosing joy. You'd be wrong. In this episode, I get honest about the gap between knowing something and living it — and why "the responsible thing" is sometimes just fear wearing a sensible cardigan.

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www.annmarieboyle.com

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Transcript

Annmarie 0:02

Welcome to I Used to be Fun, the podcast about remembering who you were before life got so serious. I'm Annmarie Boyle, author, creativity instigator, and recovering overachiever. And each week, we explore how reconnecting to creativity and play helps us feel more alive, inspired, and like ourselves again. So set down the to-do list, grab a cup of coffee, and let's go find some fun. Hey, welcome to episode three of I Used to be Fun. As I said in the intro, I'm Annmarie, and this is the podcast where we talk about creativity, play, and joy for women in midlife. Or as I like to think of it, the podcast where I say things out loud that I probably should have had figured out by now. And today, my friends, is very much one of those days. I want to tell you about a conversation I had recently, not with a guest, not with a listener, but with myself. Which, if you're like me, an introvert with a lot of open browser tabs in your brain, you know that is the type of conversation that is both super productive and equally exhausting. Here's what happened. I've been feeling fragmented and scattered lately, like I've been doing a lot of things and not doing any of them particularly well. I couldn't figure out why everything felt so disjointed when on paper everything looked great. All the things I'm working on, whether it be the podcast, drafting my next fiction book, sending out the newsletter, or speaking, they all belong together. I know they belong together, and I can explain exactly why they belong together, but I couldn't feel it. And for me, if I can't feel it, the explanation doesn't help very much, or doesn't help me hold it in my head, especially when I start to doubt myself. So I started asking myself some honest questions, and one of those questions was, "Of everything I'm working on right now, what feels the most like home?" And the answer came to me immediately, and then I immediately felt guilty about the answer because the answer was this podcast, this thing right here. The conversations, the recording, the whole messy, beautiful experiment of it. This is the thing that is lighting me up most right now. But then my very next thought, and I'm not proud of this, but I promised you honesty, my very next thought was, "You can't say that. This podcast isn't making money yet. Your books are making money. The responsible thing is to focus on advertising your Story Hill books and finishing your work in progress. So there I was, the woman who built a podcast called I Used to be Fun about reclaiming creativity and joy, and actively refusing to admit that joy wasn't as important as the practical choice. That what made me the happiest wasn't as important as bringing in money. I'm gonna let you just sit there with that for a second. I wanted to talk about this today because I know I'm not the only one who does this. I think a lot of us, especially those of us who came of age being told that creative work is a nice hobby but not a real plan, have a deeply embedded hierarchy of worthiness when it comes to our own desires. Productivity is worthy. Profitability is worthy. Practicality is worthy. But fun, joy, or feeling alive, those are the things you get to have after you've handled everything else, if there's time, which there usually isn't. And what's insidious about this, what makes it so hard to catch, is that it doesn't feel like self-denial when you're in it. It feels like responsibility. It feels like being a grownup. It feels like you're doing the right thing at the right time. And I'm sad to say it took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize that the responsible thing is sometimes just fear wearing a sensible cardigan. Now, I want to be fair to the fear because I think it deserves a little airtime before I argue with it. The fear isn't irrational. I am self-employed, and I've been self-employed for over twenty years, which means I have also been the person responsible for making sure the lights stay on. That's real. The books are making me money right now. This podcast is not. Those are just facts. And I'm certainly not here to tell you or myself that financial reality is just a mindset problem you can positive think your way out of. It's not. It's a real constraint that humans have to navigate. But here's the thing I keep forgetting. Acknowledging what brings me joy is not a financial decision, or it certainly doesn't need to be. It's not a business plan. It's not a commitment to abandon everything else. It's just the truth. And I had made it so dangerous to tell the truth, even to myself in private, that I couldn't do it without immediately defending myself against an accusation nobody had actually made. It was exhausting. It was so exhausting. That led me to thinking about why we do this. Why do we preemptively argue ourselves out of our own desires before anyone else even gets a chance to weigh in? And I think it's because somewhere along the way, a lot of us learn that wanting things, especially wanting things that look like fun or play or joy, is a liability. That it makes you frivolous or unserious, or someone who needed to be talked out of her impractical ideas for her own good. So we learned to do the talking ourselves preemptively before anyone else could. We became very, very good at being practical on our own behalf. The problem is that when you do that long enough, you stop being able to hear yourself clearly. You can't tell the difference between genuine discernment, like this isn't the right time for this, and reflexive self-denial, which sounds a lot more like I'm not allowed to want that. And the hard part about that is they can feel identical from the inside. So what do we do with all of that? Honestly, I'm still figuring it out. This isn't a tidy episode with a lesson at the end. But I will share with you what I'm trying to do in the hopes that it helps you too. I'm trying to notice the moment when I preemptively argue myself out of something, and then pause long enough to ask myself, "Whose voice is that actually?" Is it my voice? Is it genuine wisdom from someone who knows me well? Or is that the voice of every person who ever looked at something I loved and asked very kindly, or sometimes not, whether I'd thought about something more practical? Because those voices are not the same, and they certainly don't deserve equal weight in our decision-making. I'm also trying, and this is much harder, to separate naming what I love from making a plan around what I love. Because I think I've been conflating those two things. I thought admitting that the podcast lights me up meant I was committing to deprioritizing everything else, but that's not true. I can love this podcast and still show up for my work in progress. I can feel the most alive in the recording booth and still get a lot of joy from sending out my newsletter. These things are not in competition unless I make them compete. So saying what I love, what's bringing me joy, is allowed to be just information. It doesn't have to be more than that. And after all that, here's where I landed, at least for today. I built this podcast because I believe genuinely in my bones that joy is not a reward you earn after you've been responsible enough, that creativity is not a luxury, that the playful, alive version of you didn't disappear. She just got told repeatedly and in a lot of different ways that she needed to wait her turn. And I really believe that for you. But I am apparently still working on believing it for me. And I think that's okay. I think that's actually part of why I'm here talking to you. Because saying it out loud, even on the days when I can't fully feel it yet, is part of how I get there. And I hope it's part of how you get there too. So here's the thing I want to leave you with today. Not advice, but a question for you to carry around for a while. What are you currently refusing to admit brings you joy because the responsible thing lives somewhere else? You don't have to do anything with the answer. You certainly don't have to build a plan around it or justify it or defend it. But you do have to be honest enough to say it out loud, even if you only say it to yourself, even if it feels dangerous. Maybe especially if it feels dangerous. And I know I've said it a lot already, and I'm gonna keep saying it. That playful, creative woman you're looking for, she's still in there. She might take a little coaxing out, but she's ready to come out of hiding. Thanks for being here today. And if this episode hit close to home, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. You can find me at annmarieboyle.com or on Instagram at annmarieboyleauthor. And if you know someone who needed to hear this today, please share it with her. And remember, you can get my four-week free email series designed to help you jumpstart putting more play and joy and wonder back into your life at annmarieboyle.com/thewonderproject. So I'll see you next time. Now go play or make something and do it just because you want to.