Hey friends, it’s Friday. Icymi we have some events coming up that I hope you will join as an antidote to hard times, including a one-day essay revision intensive for paid subscribers, and a virtual writing retreat for founding subscribers. Both of these events will be a place to come together and focus on writing the kind of things we need to see in the world right now.
I also have another great writing prompt for you to take into your weekend. It’s from guest author
, whose novel The Guilt Pill was a favorite pool read of mine this summer. Paid subscribers to the newsletter get full access to prompts like these, to our Reading Group, to author salons, and more.There are so many of you here, which is truly amazing, but only about 5% of you are paid subscribers. We’re seeing unrestrained attacks on funding for artists, journalists, and critics, so please keep supporting the writers and important work you want to see in the world, including the work you value here.
Our guest author
Saumya Dave is a writer, board-certified psychiatrist, and mental health advocate. She’s the author of three novels: The Guilt Pill, Well-Behaved Indian Women and What a Happy Family.
The Guilt Pill explores how mothers are often encouraged to optimize every part of themselves. It was inspired by Saumya's observations during her own transition to new motherhood and her clinical work as a psychiatrist.
Saumya is a frequent television contributor to NBC news, where she discusses a variety of mental health topics. Her work has been featured on The Today Show, Meet the Press, New York Times, and more. She has her own private practice in Brooklyn, New York.
Saumya Dave on what it takes to stop optimizing every part of ourselves
For the first three decades of my life, I didn't realize I was in a perpetual state of optimizing. I didn't even know the word "optimize" until high school! But I was always doing it in some way. As an immigrant, child of immigrants, eldest daughter, millennial, mom, physician, I was always hyper aware of how I was perceived.
Growing up, I was taught that I had to look and perform in a certain way to be acceptable. Every season was about pursuing the same goal in different forms: control.
Control came in the form of counting calories and getting straight A's. If I could be the perfect student with just enough extracurricular activities and a socially acceptable body, I would decrease the risk of being offensive.
I thought I had let a lot of this go by my mid thirties but motherhood brought it out in a new way. If I got the right bassinet, logged my baby's feeds and diaper changes, and followed the right parenting accounts, I could "hack" parenting. If something wasn't going according to plan, it was surely because I wasn't trying hard enough.
It took me years to realize that the misguided belief I could optimize parenting stemmed from the same desire for control that had been there for years. In The Guilt Pill, I explore the idea of optimization through the protagonist Maya, a new mom and tech founder. Tech, a field that's often based on how much we can optimize, felt like the perfect one for her. Maya learns that she's paying a very heavy price for constantly shapeshifting herself for others. Her attempts to optimize end up leading to her unraveling. Optimizing was supposed to keep her safe but when there are so many systems failing her, there's only so much she can do. Writing about this idea through fiction was healing in so many ways.
Prompt: What is your optimization origin story?