When the Work is the Good Part

On beach umbrellas, lost friendships, and the people who feel most like themselves mid-obsession

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

This is Dispatch #26 in a series of personal reflections on passion, obsession, and what it really takes to feel alive. You can read the whole series here.

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Hi friends,

The other day, a friend asked if I wanted to spend the afternoon at the beach.

“I have a beach umbrella in my car,” he said, as if the umbrella were the selling point. “And we’ll get a bottle of wine.”

My stomach dropped. Partly because this was starting to sound like a date, but mostly because I could already hear myself trying to explain why I didn’t want to have a free afternoon at the beach.

I had plans. They were the kind of afternoon plans nobody believes are plans: work on a project I couldn’t stop thinking about, practice piano, read, and go to bed early so I could get up and write and train.

When I told him, he looked at me like I’d malfunctioned. “It’s a holiday,” he said, genuinely baffled. “And you work so hard. You deserve a break.”

He meant it kindly. He was offering the best thing he could think of — a beach, a bottle of wine, an afternoon off from a life he assumed must be exhausting. For most people, that’s the deal: you work to earn the good part, and the good part is the beach. The work is just the tax you pay to get there.

Mine runs backwards. The work is the good part. It’s not the thing I’m escaping; it’s the thing I’m itching to get back to. So when someone offers to rescue me from it, we might as well be waving at each other from parallel universes.

And the beach guy should have known better — we met at the gym, back when I mistook his discipline for my kind of strange. What gets me is exactly that moment: when I think I’ve finally found one of my own, and I haven’t. In my first year of jiu-jitsu, a teammate asked if I wanted to come to dinner at a time that ran straight into training. “But… there’s training,” I said, genuinely confused, like she’d asked if I wanted to skip dinner.

“So? Take a night off.”

I went to training. I’m fairly sure that was the first crack in the friendship.

I’ve lost other friends this way, too. Not all of them were misunderstandings, either — some of them just wanted a friend who’d take the night off without wrestling with it first, and I was never going to be her. It gets lonely sometimes. But so does a dinner you spend wishing you were at training.

I’m not claiming that working on a holiday is the secret to anything. Plenty of people rest beautifully, take the whole month of August off, and come back ready to work twice as hard. I think I’m just built a little strangely, and I’ve (mostly) stopped apologizing for the wiring.

Because it isn’t really discipline, whatever it looks like from the beach. Some of us feel most like ourselves in the middle of the thing — fully absorbed, the world faded away — and slightly off frequency everywhere else. “We’re always chasing that dragon,” Pete Wharmby, the autistic author and advocate told me. The dragon being flow, that state of total absorption, which he suspects is where certain brains most want to live.

I take real comfort in knowing there are others like me out there, even if I don’t meet many of them in the wild. In his latest book, The Land and Its People — which I laughed through at roughly ten-second intervals — David Sedaris mentions that most nights he stays home and writes while his boyfriend, Hugh, goes out to parties. Not out of guilt, or because he hasn’t earned a night out. He stays home because writing is the thing he’d rather be doing.

So I said no to the beach. I worked on my project for a few hours while my cat, Rio, batted her spring toy at my feet. I played through Adult Piano Adventures until my brain started short-circuiting. Then I read in bed until I fell asleep, fireworks going off outside — the whole neighborhood out celebrating something, me exactly where I wanted to be.

Some people would call that a sad way to live. Maybe it is. It’s also the one I keep choosing.

The beach guy, though — my guess is he won’t ask again.

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