Too Busy Building

A woman busy building her life has no time to manage yours. She's got a deadline.

I didn't set out to become someone with a deadline. I set out to be an engineer, which—if you've ever spent a morning on a production floor or in a laboratory chasing down a result—is a profession built entirely on deadlines, so perhaps it was inevitable.

But somewhere between the site visits and the sketchbooks, I became someone with several deadlines. A phonics series to illustrate. A book of vignettes to finish writing and painting, one at a time, about the things we lose and the things we're still learning to carry. And, quietly, a life to build that looks like mine and nobody else's.

Here's what nobody tells you about that kind of busy: it's protective.

There's a particular kind of peace that comes from having somewhere to put your energy. Not because ambition cures anything—it doesn't, and I'd never claim it does. Real anxiety and real low mood have real causes, and "just get a hobby" has never been the answer to either. That's not what this is about.

This is about something smaller and more practical: attention is finite, both the kind you spend and the kind you're tempted to chase. If you're spending yours on a manuscript, an illustration, a qualification, a plan—there is simply less left over for wondering what a stranger thinks of your Instagram feed, less left over for needing family and friends to notice you a certain way, and less left over for waiting on someone else's approval before you feel like your day counted.

A woman with somewhere to be is not performing peace. She's not fishing for reassurance at dinner or engineering a reaction out of the people who love her. She's just too occupied to perform anything at all.

I trained as an engineer because I wanted to build things that hold weight. I write and illustrate because I want to build things that hold meaning. Neither of those pursuits leaves much room in the diary for managing other people's opinions of me—which, frankly, is the most efficient use of a limited number of hours I've found yet.

It show up in small ways:

• Choosing the work over the worry.

• Letting a finished page speak instead of a defensive comment.

• Being far too occupied with your own next chapter to narrate anyone else's.

It's not coldness. It's not indifference to the people you love. It's simply that purpose fills the space where people-pleasing used to live, and there's no vacancy left for demanding attention from the people around you, keeping score, or waiting to be validated before you carry on. You're too busy making something real.

If you're in the middle of building—a career, a book, a business, a verison of yourself you haven't met yet—you already know this feeling. The world gets quieter. Not because it stopped talking, but because you stopped needing it to agree with you.

That's the whole quote, really, distilled down: busy building, not demanding attention, not waiting on anyone's validation. It's not a dismissal of anyone who's struggling. It's an invitation to anyone who's ready to build.

I'm buildling mine one illustrated page at a time—currently between children literature and a novel. If that's the kind of thing you'd want to read, or if you're a fellow writer, illustrator, publisher, or educator who fancies collaborating, you know where to find me.