Conjuring Self-Honoring Ambition feat. Esmé Weijun Wang
“Ambition” is a term laden with all kinds of assumptions from patriarchal, white-dominant, ableist culture. But I have good news. Ambition doesn’t have to be synonymous with the urge to acquire money, fame, or power. We can each define it for ourselves in a way that reflects the impact we want to have on the world. Here to help me figure out how is novelist, essayist, writing teacher, and ambition-redefining badass Esmé Weijun Wang.
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Mentioned:
Esmé Weijun Wang is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias and The Border of Paradise.
Her website is EsmeWang.com, and you can follow her on Instagram @esmewwang.
The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy is at UnexpectedShapeAcademy.com.
At timewitchery.com/planner you can get a Time Witchery anti-planner to help you develop your own definition of ambition.
Make Magic:
When you’re thinking about ambition, don’t think about the pressures that come from family, peers, or society about what You’re Supposed to Do. Focus instead on the excitement of doing and making things that delight you.
Transcript: Conjuring Self-Honoring Ambition feat. Esmé Weijun Wang
Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Hello, my love. I’m so excited to share with you today a conjuring episode, a conversation with a fellow witch in the world. Today’s conversation is with Esmé Weijun Wang. Esmé is a writer. She is a novelist and a memoirist, an essayist. She has written The Border of Paradise, which is just an enchanting novel, like an engrossing novel; and, The Collected Schizophrenias, which is her award-winning collection of essays that both explores and describes what it’s like to live with chronic illness, and also works to dispel misconceptions surrounding the condition of schizophrenia. In addition to this, Esmé is a gifted speaker and presenter, and she’s also the leader and creator of The Unexpected Shape, which is a community in which writers come to develop their craft and also learn to create in a way that honors their physical and psycho-emotional limitations. I remember when The Unexpected Shape was just a tiny little seed of an idea, and I’m so thrilled and delighted that is now a resourceful reality. Definitely check it out, if you are a writer.
In today’s conversation, Esmé and I talk about a lot of things, but I decided to title this episode “Conjuring Self-Honoring Ambition” because that’s really what stuck with me from our conversation. So often, ambition is coded capitalist, right? Who are the ambitious ones? The ones that will like do whatever it takes to succeed. And, I loved Esmé’s conception of ambition in this conversation that we had that’s really more than anything about going for it, about making the most of this life. And as you know, I am very here for that. So, please enjoy this conversation between me and Esmé Weijun Wang.
Natalie Miller: Hello, my love.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Hello. Good morning!
Natalie Miller: Hello! This is, my dear listener, the one and only Esmé Weijun Wang. She is an extraordinary writer. She has authored a novel, The Border of Paradise, which—will haunt you [laughs], if you read it.
Esmé Weijun Wang: [laughs]
Natalie Miller: It haunts me! [laughs] She’s the author of The Collected Schizophrenias. She is an award winner. But more than that, actually, Esmé, I want to talk about you as a revolutionary, because that is how I think of you as a writer. I think of you as a revolutionary because you are leading a community and also like an ethos, I think, of a very different way of approaching writing, and a very different way of thinking about the practice of writing. So I’m so excited to talk to you today about that.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Oh, thanks, yeah. I’m looking forward to talking about it, too. And I think the funny thing about talking about the way that I teach writing, or the way that I discuss writing, is that it really expands to cover a lot more ground than just writing. I run something called The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, which is an online writing school for ambitious writers living with limitations. But, what I teach so often applies to anyone living with limitations who want to do anything that’s at all ambitious, regardless of whether that’s writing or painting or raising children or whatever a person might want to approach.
Natalie Miller: Maybe we can say it’s like expression. I think of all of those things as kind of being in this expression category, right? Like a place where you're like, “Okay, I want to make something, in this world.”
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah, it’s creation, you know? Especially with childrearing. I mean, what could be more creative, in the very literal sense of the word, than childrearing?
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm, yeah. So, ambitious people living with limitations.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Mmhmm.
Natalie Miller: Let’s talk about ambition, real quick. Because I think—
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. [laughs]
Natalie Miller: Right? It’s such a word, ambitious. What do you think when you think ambitious?
Esmé Weijun Wang: It’s really interesting; I think there is a sort of recent backlash against the word ambition, which is so interesting to me. There has been these more vocal revolutions of rest, active rest, especially for communities of color, that are really focusing on anti-production as a form of anti-capitalism. And I think that’s really interesting and I love to observe and engage with those communities. But when I think of ambition for myself, I think of it as a project that I’m constantly working on, in terms of figuring out what ambition is for myself. So, you know how like people will collect URLs, just like [laughs]—you think of something and you're like, “Oh, I’m going to buy the domain name for that, just in case I make something someday”—so I’ve had the URL “RethinkingAmbition” for a long time. And even though I have not like created a course or written a book with that phrase in particular, I do think that rethinking ambition is a really large part of my life, and a part of all the projects that I create and I’m a part of.
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm! Well I will say actually every time you said “ambition,” immediately what comes to mind for me is the Dolly Parton from 9 to 5, that that is what Dolly does, in the morning—she pours herself a cup of ambition.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Mm!
Natalie Miller: [laughs] And I think for me, in ambition is like this desire to go for it. I am pro that. I am also pro rest. But I don’t know, Esmé, and maybe you resonate with this—I came here to make stuff. I came here to create. I love to create. I love to make. I love to reshape. I love to challenge, right? I like to be a prolific person. That feels so purposeful to me. So I’m curious, do you share that?
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah, so all of that is how I feel as well, about creation, about writing, about the business that I run. But so often, the word ambition gets tangled up with this lean in, girl boss, brand kind of concept, which is often, or usually, quite toxic in our culture, and not helpful for people or good for their bodies or spirits or emotions or minds. So, I think of ambition for myself as a feeling of excitement, as a feeling of wanting to go for it. It’s not this feeling of pressure or wanting to win awards for the sake of winning awards, or feeling pushed by other people, or my parents, or people I love, or people who love me. It’s this thing that comes from within myself, that may or may not in some part be impacted by society and the way that society thinks about success, but is also really tangled up in just the delight of making things, and in particular in the delight of writing.
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm! Yeah. It’s not the kind of ambition that has you climbing ladders, right? [laughs] All of those ladders, and all of those very narrow kind of capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, ableist—like that idea of ambition as that kind of impulse or desire from the inside is very different from the idea of ambition as like getting to the tops of the ladders to claim the prizes.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. It’s a lot like legacy is another big word that I talk about a lot and think about a lot. And so when people think of legacy, they often think of, oh, so, your obituary is going to talk about how you had a New York Times bestselling book, or you were an award winner for this, or you achieved that, or this. And for me, legacy also includes the day to day things that you do that make an impact on other people. I think that the words legacy and impact can be really interchangeable. So, if you're really kind to the cashier at the coffee shop, that will make an impact. If you are giving a dollar to someone who is panhandling on the street, that makes an impact. And so I think that those gestures and daily things that may not be headlines in newspapers or mentioned in your obituary, those are just as much of a part of your legacy as anything else. So for me, these words like ambition or legacy or any of these things, they can be tangled up in these uglier, more pushy versions of themselves, but when they are left to their own devices and allowed to flourish and take shape, they are really beautiful.
Natalie Miller: Yeah! And it’s almost like when we claim and define them for ourselves. Because of course, there are all kinds of people who are not supposed to be ambitious, [laughs] right? Who like the powers that be would prefer if we stayed in our places, and didn’t have ambitions, or didn’t want to think of ourselves as even worthy of creating legacies.
Esmé Weijun Wang: I’m sure there are lots of people who would rather Greta Thunberg be less ambitious than she is. So, there’s that, too.
Natalie Miller: Yeah, exactly. So, ambitious people living with limitations—I know that means specific things to you, and I’m curious if you could expound upon that a little bit.
Esmé Weijun Wang: So again I think that this is one of those concepts that is really expandable. It’s like a buckyball in that you can start really small and then it stretches really big, and it looks really different depending on what angle you're looking at it from. For my purposes, it usually means people who are living with chronic illness or disability. But, I think that limitations come in all kinds of different forms. People’s insecurities form limitations. The amount of money that you are able to make form limitations. The way that society treats people who look like you form limitations. There are all kinds of limitations, some of which you can control, and many of which you cannot. And so I purposely leave the word “limitations” as kind of a big blank slate that people can write on and define for themselves.
Natalie Miller: Hmm. I’m just holding for a moment this kind of paradox, right? How does one push the limit, meaning like push some of these limitations, especially the ones imposed by structural inequalities? How do we challenge those, and at the same time honor their effects on us?
Esmé Weijun Wang: The Academy that I run is called The Unexpected Shape, as I mentioned before, and I really like to talk about why it’s called The Unexpected Shape, because I think it says a lot about what I think about limitations and how I think about limitations. This particular concept of the baseball diamond came from my friend Anna’s [sp] father. I think of The Unexpected Shape as like a baseball diamond, and life is like a baseball game. Baseball is played in a very particular way. There is the diamond. There is home plate. There are different plates—first, second, third. When you play and you hit the ball, it would be really cool if you could go from first base to like home, directly, or from first base to like third base, directly. I mean, it would just be so much easier. You could get so many more points if you were able to just run to home plate—or just stay at home plate [laughs]—and gather points that way. But that’s just not how baseball is. There’s a reason that baseball has that shape of that diamond; it’s because that’s what the game is. That’s how the game is played. And so, when I talk about The Unexpected Shape, I’m talking about how we don’t know how our lives are going to look, really, from one day to the next, or one moment to the next. And so our lives are these constant flexing, fluctuating shapes, that are often unexpected, and we have to learn how to play within them.
Natalie Miller: And I’ll go a step further—which I think you'll come out with me on this branch [laughs]—and learning to do that is actually the fuel and the inspiration and the impetus for making, for creating. I know for me, for example, I created last year my Time Witchery planner, and it’s kind—it’s an anti-planner. It’s not really a planner; it’s an anti-planner. Because I as a person need a lot of flexibility in the shape of my day. I’m like super empathic. I’m very sensitive to everything—the light, the heat, like, [laughs] you name it. And what I’m up for energetically, emotionally, really shifts a lot from day to day. And every other—but, at the same time, I fucking love a planner! [laughs] Like I love to sit down and to think about like what I want to do for the day. And I’m very ambitious. I have a lot that I want to be happening. And so Time Witchery was really born from me saying, okay, what would it look like to have a place that both honors my sensitivities and enables my—I’m going to use the “ambition” word—enables my ambition, right? Like actually supports it. That was made from, I think, my experience of unexpected shapes.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. And I think that the creation of that planner is one example of what I call workarounds. I also have a course called Dream Hunting With Limitations, which used to be called Ass-Kicking With Limitations. But, so much of that concept is based on the idea that we have to figure out workarounds to get to our definitions of success, or to get at our goals, which I think are more concrete definitions of success. One really classic example that I use is that when I was in graduate school and I hadn’t become chronically ill yet, I could sit and write for seven to eight hours at a time, and I did that every day. I would just sit and have endless cups of coffee and write, and then at a certain time I would switch to gin and tonics, and then I would write, and that was my day.
But once I became ill, I couldn't write on a laptop for even 10 minutes. I couldn't sit somewhere and type for an extended period of time. So my question became, okay, just because I have these new limitations doesn't mean that my ambition has shifted. I still want to write, but can I do this? So I was wondering, okay, my first book was written before I became chronically ill. Can I write a second book, while I’m living with these limitations?
And so, the thing that I discovered that ended up being my saving grace was I wrote almost the entire text of The Collected Schizophrenias on my iPhone, on a drafts app, while lying in bed, because it was so much easier for my body to be lying down and typing—or rather, tapping, because I just used one finger, very very [laughs] quickly—but I ended up writing that way. And so, that was a workaround. And I think that sometimes, the workarounds that people come up with can be as creative as the creative thing that we're trying to do. The workarounds that people come up with in life are so interesting to me. I'm such a process nerd, and I love learning about how people make things work for themselves when life makes them hard.
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm! And it’s so interesting, because I think that because our pedagogy is so kind of teacher-led, and because our culture is so like expert-fetishizing, I think so often what we are looking for is like, “Dear Expert Person, please tell me how—” Like, “How do I do it?”
Esmé Weijun Wang: Like the guru on the hill.
Natalie Miller: Totally! Right? It’s like, “How do I do this thing? You must know, because you are”—you know—"the James Beard chef. You are the New York Times bestselling author. You are the”—I mean, lord help us—“You are the seven-figure business owner,” right? It’s like, “Please tell me, how do I do it.” And what I hear there, and what I, of course, like 100% believe, is that it’s actually so individual, how we make things work for ourselves.
Esmé Weijun Wang: And I think a lot of that is less about having one expert or the sage on the stage giving you the answers to whatever your dilemma might be. It’s much more about, for me, asking questions. And I do this with my students, obviously, as well. I love to share different things that might work for them. But I try to never say, “This is exactly how it is.” Because that is my tendency, I think, as a person. I like to joke that I have no actual opinions because I’m so easily swayed by arguments. If I think one thing, and then read a particularly convincing op-ed, I might start thinking in the other direction.
But I think this happened a lot, and I realized this a lot, when I was writing The Collected Schizophrenias. I decided early on that what I didn’t want to do was to become a mental health or schizophrenia expert that would become a talking head every time CNN or the BBC or whatever needed someone to talk about schizophrenia because of some news story. What I say in The Collected Schizophrenias is—and in it, I talk about all kinds of things that I do have opinions about. I write about involuntary hospitalization, or involuntary treatment, or forced treatment, or the policy that schools, colleges, and universities often have regarding sending their students away when they're having a mental health crisis. What I don’t do, really, is to say, “This is always bad, and no one should ever do it.” What I like to do is to gather lots of information and present it to the reader, and basically say, “This is the information that I have, and that I found, and I would like it if you could make your own decision about what you think makes sense based on what I’ve shared with you.”
And I think that’s such a more interesting way of writing. Although I may just be saying that because I can’t write in [laughs] any other way. But I think it’s such a—yeah, it’s not in me to be particularly pedantic, even though I am a teacher. I mostly want to share. And when I teach writing, I’m always saying, “I’m sharing this is how I do it. And this is how lots of people do it. I’m sharing with you lots of different methods. But there’s no law saying you have to do it the way that I do it. Please do what works for you. If this doesn't resonate with you, please just leave it, and try something else, and find the thing that does work for you.”
Natalie Miller: Yeah! And like don’t discount it, or don’t like apologize for it, right? The thing that works for you works. I don’t know if you've had this experience, but I’ve certainly had this as a teacher, is people saying, “Well, this is what I'm doing. Is that okay?” And I’m like, “Hey! If it’s working for you, if it feels good for you, you are the expert in you. Always.”
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. If it works for you, and it’s not harming you, you're not harming yourself in some way, I tend to really boost whatever my students want to do. It’s so interesting that you mentioned that kind of question of, “Is this okay? Is this the right way to do it?” As I was listening to you mention that, I was trying to think if my students actually ask that question, and I don’t think they do. Which is really interesting to me. I think that part of it, though, does come from the fact that so many of the students who come to the Academy are chronically ill or disabled, and so, are so used to finding ways to make things work for them, and knowing that if it works for them, it works for them. You know? It’s kind of this mentality that shapes your view of the world, that shapes how you see things, that shapes how you approach things.
One of my most popular pieces of writing that I’ve ever done was for ELLE, and it was called something like “I’m Chronically Ill and Afraid of Being Lazy,” and it had to do with this feeling of being kind of really Type A, ambitious person, becoming chronically ill, and not being able to work as much as I used to, and not being able to be as productive as I used to be. And so, I think that’s something that a lot of chronically ill and disabled people have to grapple with. Because again, to circle back to the beginning of the conversation, because we live in a society that very much gives out stars or gives out prizes to whoever is the most productive—if you're not productive, then you're not a “good” member of society. And so, figuring out what can make life work for you, what can help you to fulfill your own ambitions, whatever those are, is such a part of chronic illness.
Natalie Miller: I love that reflection, that if you're living with a chronic illness, you are already creating and finding your adaptations. It’s almost as if like that muscle is built up. Like, yeah, you—you know that the capital “The” capital “Way” doesn't work for you, so you've already had to figure it out. What a fabulous kind of unexpected asset and strength to have and to lean into. And then I would also just say, though, as my also, that I’m sure that it is like the ethos of your own community that also encourages that kind of individualization. When I think about teaching, I’m usually teaching for like another organization, and everybody is worried about getting it right, because I think there is maybe a subtle or not so subtle implication that there is a right way.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. It’s funny, there’s an app—I will not mention its name—there is an app that purports to allow you to be so much more productive, because if you plug in your key events, so the appointments and such that you can’t move, and then you plug in the tasks that you have to do, it will automatically plan out your entire week for you, based on those tasks and those appointments. But this app cracks me up, because it generally fills up your entire week. And it makes this assumption that I think is really funny, this assumption that everyone is going to be able to work at any time of the day. It doesn't take into account maybe you'll have a migraine, or you'll start to have a migraine in the morning, and so your entire day is wiped out. Or it doesn't take into account maybe your kids are going to get the flu. And so your very carefully AI drawn out plan is kaput, because of—that. Because your kid is barfing everywhere. I did end up trying that app, because I was like, oh, well, let’s see if this does anything. But, I never ended up being able to follow the plans that it made for me.
Natalie Miller: Yeah!
Esmé Weijun Wang: And I think things like that, they have this intention of being able to optimize humanity. But it’s our humanity that makes these things very unhelpful.
Natalie Miller: Yeah. And, as a coach, I’m also thinking, gosh, that app is also assuming that a plan and schedule and deadlines are actually motivating for the person. [laughs] Like for me, Esmé, what you just described, that is a level of hell. It’s a very—
Esmé Weijun Wang: [laughs]
Natalie Miller: —low level of—like if I arrived at hell, and they were like, “Here’s how your life works now,” I would be like, “Yes. Well played. This is like torture.” [laughs]
Esmé Weijun Wang: “This is terrible.” Mmhmm.
Natalie Miller: “This is torture for me.” Yeah. That would never, ever work for me. When we think about productivity—because I think and write and talk about this a lot, too—I actually—to kind of loop back, that idea of being a process nerd, I think a lot about what we're prioritizing in productivity. It’s like, most of productivity is prioritizing product, and not only product, but quantities of product, not quality. And not like the “ivity” part [laughs] which is like, how it happens, which is process oriented. And for me, that focus on product over process, on quantity over quality, that is—I’m going to say—and this is bold, but I’m going to go for it—that is dehumanizing. It like takes all the magic out. It takes all the like juice out of it. For me.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. It’s like the saying, “The journey is the destination” becomes “The destination is the only thing that matters and F the journey. Just get to the destination however, in the fastest way possible. Just zap your way to the destination. And there’s nothing worth having in the journey.”
Natalie Miller: Yeah. So, you made a post on The Gram that inspired me to write to you and to say, “Hey, let’s have a conversation about this.” And that post was about the way that we're told to build a writing habit. Or we can expand that to say, any kind of habit, right? [laughs] Anything you want to create. If you want to create, like, more endurance for walking; if you want to create great meals; if you want to create ethical children [laughs]. Right? Whatever it is that you want to create. It’s toxic, because it’s shaped by ableist assumptions about our bodies and minds, and then sexist and classist assumptions about—basically like our whole lives, right? Like you said, this idea that, oh, this person should probably be free from nine to six, always. Right? In that same post, you talked about how really what you think about when it comes to productivity—and I’m saying this in like a process-oriented productivity—are limitations, resources, and then like kind of rubber meets the road, what we need to do, to meet our goals. I would love to just explore that a little bit together with you, for my dear listener.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah! I have this class, which you can purchase on my website, called Building A Writing Habit While Living With Limitations. I came up with that class because I was thinking a lot about Stephen King’s very famous, very lauded book called On Writing, and how much I hate that book, and how much I hated that book when it came out. Because everybody was saying, “Oh, you should read this book. It’s so brilliant, about writing.” But what Stephen King says about what a writing habit should be just made me so angry. It was something like, if you are not writing every day for x number of hours per day, it means you don’t care about writing enough, and you're not really a writer.
I found that over the years after that book came out, it was primarily women that I would talk to who would say, “It does not work for me to write every day. That’s not a realistic thing for me to do. That’s just not part of my unexpected shape.” And so, I started thinking about, okay, so, if I’m a person who is living with limitations—which, again, that is a big umbrella and covers a lot of things—what are the things that I can use to figure out what a writing habit can look like? And I think one of the first things for me at least is, that means it doesn't look like the same thing every day. And that already throws a wrench into the gears of a lot of people’s ideas of what a habit is. Because, like I said, you might have a migraine, or your kid might get sick, or you know, anything can happen.
But what you can do is to evaluate, like you said, your resources, and you can think about workarounds, and you can think about what would feel good for you in order to build a quote-unquote “habit.” Does habit have to mean something that is every day? No. In my opinion, no. If you have certain kinds of resources, though, you can give yourself more ability to do what you want to do, in this case writing. Your resource might be money, so you can trade money for time and energy. You can hire people to clean your house, using money. Or, if you don’t have money, if money isn’t one of your resources, maybe you have a family network. Maybe you have a really tight-knit family, and you've really cultivated these relationships with your family, and you can find a cousin or a sister who can watch your kids for a few hours every day so that you can go and write. So, yeah, I think about these different ways of approaching building a writing habit, and what it really means to make sure that you can have a life that has writing in it. Because the whole point of having a writing habit, in my opinion, is that you are writing some amount, and that doesn't necessarily have to look like the same thing every day.
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm, yeah. I had to rehabilitate my relationship with writing after graduate school, Esmé. I went—I was just in an emotionally abusive PhD program. Like I know everyone is like, “Oh, yeah, that’s graduate—” No. My graduate school like [laughs]—my graduate school sent people to—institutions. Like it was really rough. And, I couldn't write for years, because it was just so devastating, the kind of criticisms and humiliations that we were put through, in this program. And I found that part of my own kind of like psycho-emotional rehabilitation around writing also involved declaring to myself that everything counts. Everything counts. So no matter what I write—if it’s a letter to a friend, if it’s a clever Instagram post, if it is like lyrics to a song about my dog [laughs]—like everything counts. I just started this kind of radical celebration of creativity. And it made a huge difference for me. Such that like even sometimes what counts as writing practice for me is reading.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah, so I think to circle back to our conversation about productivity, that is why in my restorative journaling class, I like to teach the idea of creating a “things I did today” list. Because I think people with chronic illness are constantly, like I said, beating themselves up for not being productive enough. There are so many people who, at the end of the day, are just like, “I did nothing today.” And what I challenge my students to do is to look back and say, “Is that really true? Did you really do nothing today?” Did you brush your teeth? Oh, you did? Okay. Put that on your “list of things I did today.” I brushed my teeth. Did you take a shower? Okay, put that on the list, because showering is really hard for a lot of chronically ill people. I consider taking a shower a really huge task. So, it’s getting in the habit of building that muscle, like you said, of, for you, it was things I did today that are writing. Or in terms of reading, like writing-relevant or writing-adjacent. I think even just having that list, and then being able to look back at the end of the day, and see, “Oh, I didn’t do quote-unquote ‘nothing’ today. I actually did a lot of things.” And that in itself, I think, is a really important component of quote-unquote “productivity” and being alive.
Natalie Miller: Yeah! There are so many spells in here, today, Esmé, that I just want to tease out from this conversation, just to say that what I’m really hearing is this, what we can do together to embrace our ambition, to give ourselves permission to define ambition, define legacy, for ourselves. To give ourselves permission and credit for being experts, for being productive, for being committed to this growth, even with limitations, even with planet Earth as challenging as planet Earth is in this moment. Yeah, that’s just what I’m hearing, again and again, is like, no, we're claiming this, for ourselves. We're figuring out how to make it work, for us. And even what “it” is, what it is that we're making work.
Esmé Weijun Wang: Yeah. A phrase that people really associate with me is—and I even had this put on a mug at one point—is, “Keep Going. You're Doing Great.” Keep going. You're doing great. I say it a lot on social media. I say it a lot in real life. But the reason I think that is such a powerful, mm, series of phrases or series of sentences, is that keeping going is no small thing. Keeping going, if you're a marginalized person, if you are a person who is dealing with mental illness, if you are—whatever you're dealing with, it is not easy. And if you're alive, if you're putting one foot in front of the other, I think you're doing great. And I think it’s that appreciation of that movement forward getting through the seconds of the day that I think is one of the most powerful acknowledgements that I can make.
Natalie Miller: Mmhmm! Yeah! In the bottom of the daily page of my anti-planner are appreciations. Because I think, right, when we appreciate, we give more value to. It’s like, okay, let me appreciate, you know, the shower, that I took today. Let me appreciate the sentence that I wrote. [laughs] Like, it was a sentence. And I want to give it, I want it to appreciate in value. And I find that that practice of appreciations, of giving ourselves credit, and really honoring that, yeah, showing up and keeping going is doing great, is doing great. I love that. Esmé, thank you so much for joining me today. It was so fun to talk to you. I would love for you to let people know—you mentioned so many different workshops and courses, and of course The Unexpected Shape. Where is the best place for people to go to see this whole menagerie of offerings that you've created?
Esmé Weijun Wang: I’m really excited about my website, so I’m always asking people to go to my website, which is at EsmeWang.com. If you want to learn about The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, it’s at UnexpectedShapeAcademy.com. I’m also really active on Instagram, so if you are an Instagram person and you would like to follow me there, I am at @EsmeWWang, there. So, that’s it! Thank you so much for having me.
Natalie Miller: Awesome. All right, my dear listener. I hope this inspires you to claim some of your ambitiousness for yourself, and then also to begin to explore—maybe all summer long, begin to explore, what really works for you. What is your unexpected shape, of bringing what you want into the world? Thank you so much for listening, and bye, for now.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show. Or, if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday letter at MindWitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.
Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, Executive Producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.
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