The Metamorphosis of My Book

From a boring egg to an (almost) beautiful butterfly!

Hello!

Since I have struggled to make progress on my book this last month (and if I’m honest, the same is true of April, May, and June), I figured I’d at least write something here.

After such an inspired and productive Q1, it’s frustrating to feel like I have completely stalled since. Travel is partly to blame. Disrupted routines + jet lag + reconnecting with friends (!!) + orienting to new surroundings + sporadic childcare = scattered attention that does not lend itself to the type of deep, deep work required to refine my fifth (sixth?!) draft.

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” - Buckminster Fuller

I think a lot about this quote from the architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller. At each level of my book—from word choice, to sentence structure, to paragraph order, to chapter flow—I gratefully now know what it feels like to find a truly beautiful solution.

It feels like “I can’t believe I just did that.” As in, I honestly don’t know where this beautiful solution came from. A sort of literal “OMG” that makes me wonder if my very-atheist parents might have been missing out. (Side note: writing a book, and especially editing it, is an incredible, if exhausting, way to tap into your spirituality and strengthen your intuition!)

Which is all to say that I want this final draft to feel truly beautiful. While many of its pieces do (🙏hallelujah!🙏), a few decidedly don’t 😩. And I worry that it’s not possible for me to find a beautiful solution while in Mexico (or NYC for that matter).

And that is because I have come to see this book as being inseparable from Vietnam, where (to employ a cliche, but apt, pollinator metaphor) its most impressive metamorphosis took place.

Allow me to explain…

Metamorphosis!

“I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.” Buckminster Fuller

🥚 Stage 1: Egg [Japan: Sept & Oct 2023] 🥚

Believe it or not, the primary motive of our year abroad was not to adventure but to lower our cost of living (and especially the cost of childcare). I felt compelled to write a book, and drastically cutting my expenses was the only way to satisfy this compulsion.

Inspired by the Fuller quote above, I intended to write a book about fun. It felt (and still feels) obvious to me that the world needs more fun (ICYMI: I explain why in this post from last year).

Over the previous ~half year, I had thought a lot about the answers to two questions:

1. what fun was? and

2. how can we have more of it?

From my research, I knew these questions had not yet been sufficiently answered. The two published books about fun didn’t even come close to capturing what I felt were the “beautiful solutions” to such a pressing problem.

For funsies, here is the intro I wrote to that book:

Have fun! We say this and hear this all the time, but do we really know what fun is and how to have it?

I thought I did, but to be honest, I hadn’t given the question much thought until I realized that my partner was having a lot more fun than I was, around the time our baby entered this world.

By any measure, I had a great life: a supportive partner, a healthy child, wonderful friends, an interesting career, and sufficient free time to enjoy a few hobbies.

I would call myself happy, both by nature and design. And yet, deep down, something had long felt like it was still missing.

I tried new jobs. I tried new hobbies. I tried new cities. I tried all the happiness and productivity and career advice that was fit to print in the New York Times. None of it tangibly filled this nagging gap.

My partner meanwhile wasn’t experiencing any of this existential angst. He was simply enjoying his life. No matter where we were or what we were doing, he found a way to have fun.

So I started studying him. Why was he able to enjoy waiting in a line while I grew more and more impatient? Why did he claim to be having fun even when he didn’t look like it? How is it that he found putting our baby back to sleep in the middle of the night—an ordeal that could easily take over an hour—to be fun? (Yes, he seriously claimed this, and still maintains he enjoyed those sleepless nights.)

I figured a sample size of one might not be enough to teach me how to have more fun, so I started studying other what other people had to say about “fun” too (some of which I’ll cover in this book). To be completely honest though, I learned more from my partner than from all the books and research and interviews combined.

Over the course of my “studies,” I did my best to intentionally apply everything that I learned. These experiments, which I’ll touch on more throughout this book, had varying degrees of success.

Today, I would say that I’m far from the most fun person in the world, but I’ve learned a lot about what fun is and isn’t, what blocks it, and most importantly, how to have more of it (no improv, travel, fat paychecks, or costumes required!).

Fun is not silly, it is serious business. It can guide us to more fulfilling careers and relationships. It holds the power to resolve conflict and bridge divides. It is critical to our well-being. Yet most of us are approaching it in ways that makes having it less likely, if we’re trying to have it at all.

My hope is that this book will not only persuade you to prioritize having more fun in all areas of your life, and will provide you with the tools to do so.

"Do anything, but let it produce joy." - Walt Whitman

I continued to organize my thoughts and write in earnest. There was just one problem, and it was a big one considering the topic: I wasn’t having fun.

If I wasn’t having fun writing a book about fun, who was going to have fun reading it? No one.

That’s when it hit me: if I was going to expect the world to understand what fun was, I would have to embody it. It was time to break out of my comfort zone and try a different approach (that’s my egg-to-caterpillar metaphor, get it?).

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.” - Buckminster Fuller

🐛 Stage 2: Caterpillar [Thailand: Nov & Dec 2023] 🐛

I arrived in Thailand asking myself how I could produce a work of art that would embody fun. I knew for sure that writing a prescriptive sort of book and following an outline was not only not fun, it was quite simply not me.

I decided that any book I write should reflect how my brain works when I let it run free.

My vision for this new book was wild (like my brain!). I wanted it to feel like a choose your own adventure novel. More like an artsy zine than a novel. A mix of poetry and personal essays and short fiction and photography and reflection exercises and wacky challenges. Fun!

Here is the rough intro I wrote to that book (notice how different it is already!):

Of the 37 years I have been alive, my best estimate is that I’ve spent roughly four cumulative years watching TV.

While I’m certainly not proud of this, I’m not exactly ashamed either.

In part because at least one of those years was spent watching shows that were classically educational. I learned how fish sleep from the Nature of Things, how much a Chinese cup made of rhinoceros horn is worth from Antiques Roadshow, and how to masturbate from Sue Johanson’s Sunday Night Sex Show.

Another one of those years was spent watching shows that would lift my mood when it really needed lifting, like the marathons of Say Yes to the Dress when my mom was in hospice, or of Rick & Morty when the pandemic turned our world upside down.

While the two years I just described engaged my brain, the third year was spent trying to disengage it. I watched any reality show from Bravo or Netflix after a draining day at work and Broad City when I was feeling particularly lost and lonely after a move to Toronto.

Despite all the ways these shows (and others) have helped me over those three years, it is the way I spent the fourth year that was the most formative. The most important and impactful hours I have spent glued to the TV were spent watching nothing in particular.

Which is all to say, I have spent roughly an entire year of my life mindlessly shuffling from one show to the next, trying to find something I like.

Why does that matter?

Well for one, none of those other three years of much needed enlightenment and distraction would have been possible without this year spent searching. But more importantly, that searching was as good a window into my subconscious as any mushroom trip. Who and what caught my eye? Why?

Time spent searching, questioning, may feel like superfluous fat that should be minimized, if not cut altogether. But the chef Samin Nosrat will tell you a balance of “salt, acid, heat, and fat” is required to make a meal delicious. Fat isn’t just necessary in your diet, it makes life worth living.

Most importantly though, the act of channel surfing itself, especially in those precious few decades between TV antennae and online streaming—the era of paper TV Guides folded into your Saturday newspaper, when there was no other option but to channel surf—was a better predictor of how my life would actually be than any episode of Sex and the City ever could be.

My life has been more like:

• a Sunday morning of televangelism and football pre-games—neither of which I start the day interested in, yet both of which mysteriously draw me in—than it is like an algorithmically curated and personalized list of shows I “Might Like.”

• being a car-less woman subjected to Geico and Cialis commercials that I can’t skip or block or upgrade to avoid, than it is like a full episode of Modern Family where all conflicts have a neat beginning and end.

• stumbling on an episode of House of Cards, where I stand no chance of orienting myself, than it is like a new season of Love is Blind dropping, where I can follow the entirety of a couple’s relationship.

Life is not having the option to pause when my baby wakes up an hour after he went to bed, to rewind when I overhear a juicy conversation after all the crucial details were exchanged, or to fast forward when I am laid off from a job after I just signed an outrageously expensive new lease.

The thing is, my life is more fun when I let it unfold like a journey through 37 cable channels.

Channel surfing taught me how to quickly move between worlds—each of which is valid and promising,—how to get comfortable with ambiguity, and how to delight in the grand mystery of it all.

When done right, channel surfing is an art of suspending judgement. It should surprise me. It should remind me that my preferences aren’t always known or static. Who knew I would end up enjoying Storage Wars or Sports Center? Who knew I could learn so much about conflict resolution from Jersey Shore or The Amazing Race?

I want this book to feel like channel surfing, in particular the good ol’ days of channel surfing, during that special, fleeting time of your life when watching TV wasn’t yet a guilty pleasure, just pure pleasure; when you didn’t know what you were looking for and you were ok with that; when you let yourself linger on anything that caught your eye, even if it was just The Weather Network.

May you find what you are looking for. May you find something that interests you when you least expected it. May you linger on something that doesn’t long enough for it to surprise you. May you rejoice in using your imagination to fill in the blanks. May you marvel at all that you don’t know, and wonder yet at all that you do. May you laugh at any incongruities and not lose sleep over any offenses. May you move on without shame when it feels right to do so.

May you feel seen. May you feel heard. May you feel a little less lonely, a little less crazy, and a little more free.

May you ride the waves and not ask where they go.

Like a voracious caterpillar (gotta keep the metamorphosis metaphor going!), I plowed through a near complete first draft of this “book” in just a couple months. It was pretty easy when I could do whatever I wanted!

This is when I started to solicit feedback. I am not normally great at accepting feedback (correction: I don’t ever seek feedback, let alone take it), but I knew that there was enough of a gap between what I had produced and its potential to require it.

Would you believe that approximately 0% of what I wrote for Book 1 (fun) and Book 2 (choose your own adventure) are part of Book 3 (pollinators)?! So what happened?

The pupa stage.

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” - Buckminster Fuller

🇻🇳 Stage 3: Pupa [Vietnam: Jan, Feb, Mar 2024] 🇻🇳

As the above quote suggests, the transformation that occurred in this “cocoon” phase of my book was extraordinary and dare I say, totally unpredictable.

I owe a huge, heartfelt shoutout to Dany, Mitch, Geoff, Beth, Jenny, and Tes who so generously dug in to the earliest, roughest, drafts of Book 1 & 2, and shared enough food for thought for me to spin a cocoon with 💗.

This is where and when things got really interesting. I had successfully let my brain roam free and now, not only was I finally having fun, it was as if the book took on a life of its own, and it was no longer even me doing the thinking/writing.

Fun, it turns out, is quite a spiritual experience (but more on that later…).

Because this post got rather, unexpectedly long, I’m going to finish describing the metamorphosis in a part 2!!

STAY TUNED!!!