Oops, I optimized my bath again

Notes on index cards, Trick Mirror and always learning how to write

I am in the bath reading Trick Mirror again. Like plenty of other women my age, I walk around every day with Jia Tolentino’s essay on optimization bouncing around in my head. I feel drawn to revisit it today after teaching a class on habit tracking and spiraling into conversation about the pitfalls of "over-Notioning” life.

With me in the bath I have a few essentials: A bamboo tray, of course, but also an additional tray that moves around the house with me carrying my books. Clipped onto that is the book light that I resisted buying for months because it is so clearly something you're supposed to get at the flea market or dollar store but they're selling it on Amazon for $12. Splayed out across the wood tray are a small stack of index cards and a Pilot G2 pen.

The first time I read Trick Mirror, I'd just landed in Los Angeles. It was 2019, which meant Airbnbs were still rooms you were renting in some guy's house. Mine turned out to be a scam. The friends who offered me a couch weren't off of work yet, so I sat down at that Barnes & Noble in The Grove and grabbed the book everyone kept posting pictures of on Instagram.

I stayed there for hours inhaling it. By the time my friends invited me over, I’d spent $25 I didn't have just to be able to make notes in the margins. What I remember most wasn't the content of the essays, though they have clearly made an impact on me. What got me was the way she wrote.

Writing is interesting because it's the one place in my life I feel both intrinsically talented and profoundly insecure. I've never sounded smart enough for my own liking.

In the 12th grade, after writing an essay on abortion rights, I asked a classmate—someone I knew to be a smart boy with a good SAT score—to read it. He told me it was well-written but "full of rhetoric." A few years later in college, studying journalism, professors told me I "wrote with heart" but used the first person too much.

My style, I learned, was better suited for blogging and content marketing—those forms of writing that paid well but were deemed anti-intellectual by the people whose opinions I respected.

Sitting in that bookstore in 2019, I knew I wanted to write like Jia Tolentino. I just didn't understand how. Was there some innate talent I was missing and would never be able to possess? Did this mean I should finally go to grad school? Obviously I needed to read more, but read what? The classics? The New Yorker?

As it turns out, I didn't go to grad school. My roommate had The New Yorker for a while, but then they charged her like $150 unexpectedly and she had to cancel. I kept writing content for content's sake, drafting Instagram captions and rhetoric-filled sales emails advocating for the value of various products and services. I mimicked the voice and mannerisms of the entrepreneurship industry for a while, then learned that I saw better results when I used my own. Eventually, I got good enough at writing for sales that I was able to work on my passion project full-time.

Still, there was a dull ache in the pit of my stomach, an unfulfilled dream left to wait in the wings. What about my writing, the real writing? What about my art?

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Which brings me back here, to the bath. I'm taking notes on index cards, which is safer than lugging in my Remarkable tablet and less dysregulating than trying to think under the blue light of my phone. As I move from one card to the next, tracking Tolentino's references in the chapter "Always Be Optimizing," I understand, for the first time, how an essay like this comes to exist.

You should know that I'm currently obsessed with index cards. I love them. They are strewn in piles all over my desk and stuffed between the pages of my favorite books.

What I love about the index card is that it's a canvas. It's got built-in constraints; even the larger 4x6 cards contain only 15 lines. By the time you've "gotten going" writing on an index card, you're already being asked, by the nature of the thing, to wrap it up and get to the point.

Index cards are also tangible: you can pick them up, move them around, connect them to one another with string. (You can do this with digital tools now too, but then of course what will you do in the bath?)

What I'm beginning to understand, while jotting down quotes from Trick Mirror and drawing my own connections, is that a non-fiction book, like anything else, is a system. It's made up of inputs, outputs, and interconnections.

The books and articles and movies and YouTube videos and comment sections and café conversations we consume all day come into this system, and we as artists do the work to produce something (notes, thoughts, observations) out of them.

As we do that, we're forming interconnections. We're connecting the dots. As I watch Tolentino connect Sweetgreen to cyborgs to barre class to Frankenstein, I see this process of meaning-making at work. I realize, for the first time, that by reading her writing I am also watching her think.

Above: My notes on Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I’m sure you’ll see these sentences again someday.

In an interview with The Creative Independent, Tolentino defines what success as a writer looks like for her:

"At a basic level, I think something is successful if I got myself anywhere new at all. Which doesn't mean getting anywhere conclusive. It doesn't mean getting anywhere definite. I could have just moved something in my mind. If anything of any sort was revealed to me as I was writing, I feel that is a successful thing."

And though the mean smart boy who lives in my head desperately wants to rescue me from the embarrassment of comparing myself to bestselling author Jia Tolentino, I have to say it:

This is what we writers do. We bring our books and pens and slips of paper into the bath and sit naked in front of the page, capturing the movement of our own thoughts.

This, whatever is happening right now in the bath, is not me trying. This is me effortless. This is me in flow.

At the same time, it’s important to note that I only got here because I tried. Flow happens as a result of me deciding to arrange the index cards on a pretty tray, fill the bath with warm water, take one hit of the pen, and leave my phone and its bottomless supply of distractions in another room.

Sometimes flow surprises me, interrupting me in the middle of checking my email or whatever, but more often than not it follows this pattern: I line up the variables, show up to the page, think out loud, and, eventually, find the point.

What I missed that day in Barnes & Noble is that the secret to being the kind of artist I admire is not tucked away in some solution I can buy. Sure, it'd be nice to have someone to edit or offer constructive feedback on my work. Yes, it's always important for a writer to read. But in all my searching for a magic potion that would transform me into the writer of my dreams, I glossed right over the most important part: I've simply got to keep writing.