You Don't Need To Be So Scared Of Unfulfilled Potential
On sabbaticals, presentism, and scratching "should" from your vocabulary altogether
I’ll put it bluntly: I’ve been a bad writer this past month.
I haven’t written anything seriously—other than the articles I write for work, that is—since April or possibly May. Recent attempts at poetry have been futile. Ideas for new fiction pieces perish before they even make it onto the page. I bought a lot of books about writing last month, hoping they might arouse some sleeping giant of literary genius within me, but they’ve already started to collect dust.
As July began bleeding into August, I could feel my creative spirit withering under the weight of my own inaction. I’m sure my therapist grew tired of hearing me complain about the same banalities during our weekly appointments: “I don’t remember the last time I wrote something I liked. I can’t find my creative energy anymore. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a good story idea in my life."
But it wasn’t the half-finished poems floating unnamed in my Google Drive that haunted me. Rather, it was my unfulfilled potential that started to rattle its chains.
I’m lucky to have been surrounded by a lot of well-meaning, supportive individuals throughout my life. Pretty much every adult who knew me in elementary school told me I would most certainly grow up to become a writer. My parents made frequent jokes about retiring early once I wrote my first bestseller. (They’re still banking on that, tbh.) By the time I graduated high school, my friends were writing things like “Can’t wait to read you in the New York Times!” onto the inside cover of my yearbook.
While it’s undoubtedly nice to know that people believe in your abilities, growing up acutely aware that they expect you to make something of yourself can become somewhat debilitating. I’m unbelievably grateful that my work has been well-received by the people in my life. But in the moments where my creative output sputters and dies, I can feel the specter of my unfulfilled potential wrap an icy claw around the back of my neck and chide: Why am I sitting around and wasting precious time? I should be working to write for the New York Times. I should be writing new poems every day. I should be working on that bestselling novel.
I begin panicking that I’m letting a lot of people down—including myself.
After all, I’m supposed to be a Writer, capital W. It’s how everyone perceives me: a moody, black turtleneck-wearing Didion-wannabe whose coffee addiction is about as crippling as her ego-fueled desire to see her name in print. If I’m not writing, then who exactly am I? (It turns out that writer’s block can also fuel identity crises of a hitherto unknown scale.)
But here’s what I slowly began to realize about unfulfilled potential. The things we “should” be doing don’t really exist, kind of like the way the past and the future could be argued are nonexistent concepts (as defined by presentism, or the idea that only present entities exist).1 What’s real is the here and now, not the “should be’s” of an imaginary future. And obsessing over the future of possibilities, rather than focusing on the present, was quite honestly making me miserable.2 I think there’s a case to be made that the word should doesn’t belong in our vocabulary anymore, as it only encourages us to examine what is lacking from our lives.
By my definition, potential is just a concept, and deciding to focus on what you’re not doing versus what you are can mean the difference between enjoying your life and being consistently mad and irritated at yourself. We’re given a finite amount of time on Earth, and, as Oliver Burke argues in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, our control over that time is limited, too.
That means life isn’t about figuring out how to hack your productivity to max out your own potential. It’s a delicate dance of balancing your bandwidth and intentionally allotting time and energy to the things that matter to you. Just because you could be writing a bestseller or learning to speak French fluently or mastering piano or making money from your art doesn’t mean you have to. And putting pressure on yourself to see all your potential realities into fruition can keep you from what really matters: the present.
Through most of July I tried to shift my perspective from “I should really be writing right now” to “I’m choosing to spend my time and energy on other things.” And for the most part, it worked. I spent the month eating well and often, running through the woods, swimming in lakes, driving a G-Wagon through LA, baking really good desserts, and reading Sarah Winman’s Still Life from my favorite wine bar. It was a joy to simply be present and bask in the slow, sticky heat of the summer.
July served as a reminder that there is a life to be lived beyond constantly chasing down my own potential. The writing will pick back up again—this I must trust blindly. In fact, I’ve just told all of my clients to please not email me in the month of August; I’m taking a much-needed sabbatical from work altogether so I can redirect my energy into my creative pursuits. And I’m not doing this out of fear that I’m not living up to my own potential (well, maybe I am a little bit), but rather as a way to honor the idea that, yes, my creative energy can and will return to me. I just have to budget my time and energy and give it some space.
I think often about this quote from Austrian writer Stefan Zweig: “Auch die Pause gehört zur Musik.” (“The pause belongs to the music as well.”) Just because you’re taking a break or redirecting your focus doesn’t suddenly mean you’re not living up to your potential. No matter what you decide to do with your one wild and precious life, you’re making music all the same.
Eternalism, by some accounts, disproves this theory by arguing that all existence in time is equally real. For the purposes of this essay, I’m sticking with presentism.
By the way, this is different from the ideas I explored in my last essay about fantasizing. Imagining a better future is inherently an optimistic act; by contrast, telling yourself that the future should be different, rather than emphasizing the possibilities that could be, introduces blame and pressure into modes of thinking and begets negative emotions.