mental illness – A Productive Hannah

The Motivation to Not Do Anything Else

“But how do you find the motivation to just… write?”

This seems to be a golden ticket question on every writing forum, at every book signing, in every writing workshop. Motivation.

I never really got that question. How do I find the motivation to write? How do I find the motivation to breathe? Things may stand between me and my writing goals, but motivation never seemed to be the issue.

Lately, I’ve run into various speedbumps and found myself questioning my motivation. I felt motivated to write. Yet writing time didn’t seem to happen, pushed off until I was right up against deadlines I’d set for myself, other things taking its place. I wouldn’t say much in the way of breaks or procrastination was happening, either—it was events and appointments, health issues, more urgent deadlines, and generally putting out fires. In fact, I felt agitated by my lack of writing time. It seemed like every time I sat down to write, something else occupied my time or my mind.

For a minute there, I thought the issue—despite constantly running up against my own deadlines—was that I was actually not being ambitious enough. I knew I could afford to push writing off, so I did. I was aiming for ten thousand words in a month then, which for me seemed low. Yet I was constantly running up against my deadline. Not because I’d been working hard at writing all month and was still failing to meet my goal, but because I was running around doing other things, then sitting down to whip out the words in the last day or two or three of the month. And I could. If I just need to get words down, a fifteen thousand word day isn’t out of the question. Given that I was only counting words I was posting to the Internet—words that needed to be typed, edited, formatted, posted, promoted—a five thousand word day was about my max. Three days right at the end of the month seemed an almost generous timeline.

So I upped my goal to fifteen thousand. No dice. In a relatively rare instance, I didn’t hit my word count goal—or even my previously lower word count goal—at all. I only posted five thousand words.

So what gives? I thought. The motivation was there—and I tried framing that issue a thousand ways. Was it my energy? My focus? My creative spirit? But nurturing all of those things failed to address the issue.

Eventually, I realized that if I really wanted time to write—and to really enjoy it, not crank out words as the clock ticked down—I had to make time. I wasn’t really carving out time, just setting a word count goal—a goal I knew I could ignore for twenty-eight days or so at a time to prioritize other things. So I changed tactics. I decided that for at least fifteen minutes a day, I would write. I was also very familiar with the kind of results that can produce. If we’re just talking getting words down, over a thousand words was common for me in a focused fifteen minute period. If anything, I expected actual output to go up even though this goal, too, seemed small. But there were many pros to it. I got to do it every day—and I really did view it as a get to. On the flip side, like my other daily tasks, it was automatically excused for certain reasons—like travel, which had eaten into my time to see to monthly goals the month prior, without forgiveness.

My productivity—writing wise—exploded with this method. Truthfully, once I’d been in the flow for fifteen minutes, I didn’t want to stop, and somehow, extra time seemed to appear. Even if I stopped putting words on paper, my mind kept going. By visiting with my writing projects every day, and therefore having them constantly in my head, I was having ideas faster than I could write them down. Productive ideas, not just my characters begging for scraps of my attention by spinning up interesting, but implausible, storylines. Besides just words getting posted, I was doing other important work I now realize had been neglected.

If not my motivation, and if the time kept appearing, what really changed here?

I wasn’t just being dramatic or arrogant with my opening questions. How do I find the motivation to write? How do I find the motivation to breathe? Of course, you don’t need motivation to breathe. But how often do you just sit and breathe? Many people find this seemingly simple task very difficult. And why? It’s certainly not about their motivation to breathe. It’s about their motivation to just breathe. In reality, it’s about their motivation to not do anything else.

My issue wasn’t my motivation to write. That felt luxurious, the way that just breathing can once you train yourself for it. My issue was my motivation to put down everything else and just write. It can feel kind of self centered to just breathe when everything wants your attention, and that was what just writing felt like for me.

In a way, I’m always writing, like I’m always breathing. In a way, writing is a lot more than putting words on paper, a fact I reconnected with when I realized I was having ideas chapters ahead of time when I wrote every day, instead of forcing uninspired words once a month. If you’ve ever written so much as a list (shopping or packing or to dos), you probably understand this. While doing something else, things pop into your head. Buy milk. Pack an umbrella. Call doctor. Ideas get explored, and daydreams played out. By the time the paper comes out, it’s just transferring what was already written in your head onto the page in a coherent order. Sitting and just writing for me can also look a lot like staring at the wall while all the good work happens in my head, though I concerned myself only with the final part of that. The rest seemed to sort itself out.

I realized that in a way, I did have a motivation issue on my hands. It wasn’t that I wasn’t motivated to write, it was that I was too motivated to do everything else, or not motivated enough to not do anything else.

I had more than twenty-four hours’ worth of things to do in any given day, and something had to give. I had many balls in the air. I had stopped juggling any ball that I didn’t truly need or want, and each one had tighter boundaries, better optimization, fewer sub goals/projects and tasks/events, and lower minimums than ever, and were beneficial for people beyond just me, but it just wasn’t enough.

Yet, I felt trapped. What was I supposed to do, then?

While I was wrestling with that question, something sure did give out: my mental health. I don’t exactly recommend it as a clarity seeking technique, but literally mid (arguable) self harm relapse, dissociatedly fantasizing about what would come of it, it hit me.

A while back, my wife correctly pointed out that when I am unhappy in a situation, rather than making external changes, I first tend to self destruct. Primarily, I think this is out of self blame—if I could just handle it, any situation would be fine. (I do, to an extent, believe in changing myself before the situation, which I’ve written on before. It very much aligns with my stoicism oriented beliefs, but there’s a point after which this is more like giving up—like when the situation can be bent further and I cannot, and I just sit there and literally destroy myself instead of changing anything.) But, my self destruction also functions as a cry for help—a way to make the pain I feel on the inside be a problem on the outside, and make someone come save me, force the situation with powers I just don’t have. Or… do I?

In my fantasizing about what would come of this self harm relapse, I saw decisions being made for me about having to rest and what to not do. And I realized that, while difficult, while they might disappoint some people (though really, people have been more understanding than I gave them credit for) and involve really enforcing some boundaries and prioritizing for myself, that they were all decisions I could just, at the end of the day, when push came to shove… make. No one was actually coming to save me—these were my things to make decisions about—and it was that or self destruction.

If I wanted to do literally anything, I needed the motivation to not do everything.

The realization is in place, and with it, the details have started to sort themselves out, impossible decisions now seeming trivial in the big picture view.

Change is coming. I know what I truly need and want to do.

And I am motivated to not do anything else.

Toxicity in Productivity Culture

There’s a lot of toxicity in productivity culture, really.

I might be particularly susceptible to it. But I notice that when people talk about staying up particularly late to finish something or waking up particularly early when they’re eager to get back to it—generally speaking, skipping out on sleep—I am jealous. It’s not really a possibility for me. I am not a functional person without my psychiatric meds. I have to take them every night—even one skipped or reduced dose can wreak psychotic havoc—and they knock me out. I will not be doing anything once I take them (you should see what happens if I need the bathroom) for a minimum of eight hours. Sleeping less than eight hours a night is not an option. And… boo hoo, right? I must sleep a normal human amount, consistently, and I have a lifestyle easily built around this fact! So why am I so jealous of the occasional all nighter?

Meanwhile, I’m recovering from an eating disorder. Not only is that another great reason to take my meds and get my sleep, but, right now at least, I’m logging three meals and three snacks at set times, to share with my team, per day, among other tasks. Yes, this element is more forgiving, but if I want to recover, I ultimately have to stick with the program. No skipping lunch because I’m in the zone, which I miss terribly. Boo hoo. I must eat enough to fuel my mortal body, consistently, and I have a lifestyle easily built around this fact! So why am I so jealous of people skipping a meal for the sake of flow?

Toxicity in productivity culture.

There’s romanticization of self neglect in almost every story of success—how a business was built on all nighters and more caffeine than food. There’s competitiveness—especially in demanding environments—the, “Oh, you slept for four hours last night? I only slept three.” There’s endless advice to be found on how to reduce your need for sleep, or “research” on why you really only need six hours. There’s an assumption that productive people are cutting corners on self care to squeeze out more work. You’re supposed to be both an early riser and a night owl. To skip breakfast on your way out the door and give up your lunch break.

Sure, plenty of productivity books will say you should prioritize self care—in the name of productivity, forget your happiness and health—but if you read between the lines, there’s the assumption of work first, you later, and that you are here because you are interested in being a productive person, so you’ve obviously at least dabbled in skimping on your needs. It’s like purposefully missing the memo about self neglect makes you self absorbed.

But that’s not going to keep you healthy or happy. And productivity wise, it’s not sustainable. It’s better to sleep and eat enough now than to spend months too burnt out (and miserable) to work worth mentioning later. I ran myself into the ground trying to craft the perfect college application, only to burn out and drop out in tenth grade (psychotic break aside). My wife tried to launch a business in an impossible amount of time, only to take an ambulance ride to the emergency room (which is, by the way, expensive). The risks are real.

Plus, those demanding environments are social nightmares. It can feel close knit (dare I say cultish), but whom do you turn to for real support when everyone laughs at you for getting more than half of the sleep you need? (And how are you going to develop boundaries?)

I don’t want to get into healthism or condemn the occasional, voluntary skipped lunch or late night—but the underlying idea that it’s required, constantly? That’s something worth examining. I’m certainly still fighting it.

And let’s take a little detour into creativity. There are endless articles and more on the link between creativity and mental illness. You’ll find ones that say that mentally ill people make better art or more art. That most artists are mentally ill, or that most mentally ill people are artists. Then you’ll find an article that debunks the one you just read. And then—

The idea of this link between mental illness and creativity is everywhere. There’s some subtle, toxic incentivization for artists to become and stay mentally ill. And messages that good art is created via trauma and disorder, rather than by putting in the work of practice.

Don’t get me wrong. I write on this subject myself—but I speak anecdotally about my own experience. The idea is worth examining. But we still should consider health, happiness, and sustainability as well as creativity and productivity. I want to consider these concepts and links for myself as someone who is, incurably, a schizophrenic, and is, incurably, a writer, not make people want to live with a disability or view trauma as a shortcut to great art. And I still generally focus on prioritizing my wellbeing and putting in the work.

Ultimately, we should remember that we are our own best asset, and take care of ourselves the way we take care of our favorite calendars and pens. Yes, it may make us more creative and productive, too, but also, we should just do it for ourselves.

Some Myths and Realities of Burnout

Nothing scares me quite like burnout. For someone with so much general anxiety, I have few specific fears these days. Needles? Sign me up. Literally, I’m a plasma donor. Heights? I’m free to go ziplining again tomorrow. Snakes? They’re my buddies. Public speaking? I do it for a living.

But burnout strikes fear into my heart. “I got burnt out once,” I’d say, with the thousand yard stare.

The real problem is that I wrap burnout up in a lot of other things. The time I got “burnt out” was actually a psychotic break/the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. I basically dropped out of tenth grade, losing my life plan at the time and most of my then friends. Around the same time, my parents got a divorce; I cut off contact with my dad, and I moved out of my childhood home, soon having to rehome my beloved cat. A lot happened at once.

The next several years were rough: frequent, severe panic attacks and general anxiety, developing an addiction to self harm, culminating in a suicide attempt, navigating my social and sensory issues with new awareness, plenty of hallucinations, delusions, and other psychotic symptoms, frequent, severe dissociation, seeing an ever changing cast of mental health professionals, with several near hospitalizations, trying what sure seemed like most of the psychiatric meds known to mankind, having various physical health issues, failing to accomplish much of anything, so on.

But that’s not really burnout. That’s a lot more than burnout. Still, that’s what I think of burnout as, and the idea I was just plain burnt out from the intensive magnet program I’d been in (plus extracurriculars) was thrown around a lot for a time, especially before the schizophrenia diagnosis.

And going through that again is what strikes fear into me like nothing else.

In a way, I can’t go through most of that again, logistically. And you can only develop schizophrenia once. Yes, I’ll have symptoms every day for the rest of my life, but you only have your first unexpected, confusing, world shattering psychotic break once.

So there’s still, really, nothing to be afraid of.

Actual burnout is unpleasant, but (typically) less world shattering. Still something to be avoided, but maybe not something to be feared. And pretty much every kid I went to that magnet school with had that.

Burnt out isn’t exactly a healthy personality trait, yet it’s one that many former gifted kids add on to the label long term. And why do these things so often go together?

Gifted kids are a bit of a cultural phenomenon. As a society, we hold an intense fascination with these kids that just seem to have something we don’t—a gift, if you will. Almost everyone loves the precocious child on a talk show who’s a prodigy at this or that, but that love is, frequently, tinted with something dark. There’s an element of jealousy—why didn’t I get this precious gift—combined with the denial of how much of this gift is frequently just the capacity to be obsessed, and very hard work. (I talk in another post about how privilege plays into, and doesn’t play into, productivity.)

But the other factor, I think, is that when something is an extreme, we want to see just how far it can go. Gifted kids of all levels and types are frequently told how much potential they have, that they can do anything if they set their mind to it, and are often pushed to their limits.

In explaining to these kids how much they can and “should” do (with not living up to your potential often framed as the worst thing one can do, despite the fact that not using every ounce of your energy is actually very healthy), we fail to show them where their limits are, teach them how to set boundaries, teach them that they are an asset they need to protect, teach them how to take care of themselves. We teach them that they need to be challenged, often in any way the adults feel like, often regardless of their actual skills or passions.

So of course many of them become burnt out (and therefore unproductive) adults. They were never shown how to do anything but run at 101% capacity.

And I do still actively try to avoid burnout. I subscribe to the philosophy of self care isn’t escaping, it’s creating a life you don’t need to escape from. Now, everyone just needs a break or to mix it up sometimes—and scheduling that in advance may be a part of preventative self care—but the point is, creating something sustainable. Not running at 101% all the time.

I think one of the most important things is boundaries. Many productivity guides talk about what is the minimum I will do but not what is the maximum I will do (though, that’s starting to pick up, as we talk about work life balance in a world with more remote work). That is something we must all also think about in advance to avoid burnout.

For example, I have limits on the events I’ll run. How many events I’ll teach or organize in a given week or month.

I also schedule physical and mental self care as part of my minimums, including the basics, and things like various forms of meditation, tarot reading, hiking, digital detoxes (and having general digital boundaries), journaling, spending time with loved ones, traveling, reading, and other things that help my mental health, help me look inwards, unwind, connect and disconnect with the right things, and learn new things.

I need to be realistic about my goals, and focus on only the essential: hence my belief in values based productivity.

I know what’s important to me, and that’s what I put my energy into—and that’s what I take time to recharge my energy for.

And that’s what matters.

Schizophrenia in Creativity and Productivity

I honestly don’t remember much around the origins of one of my other blogs, The Schizophrenia Diaries. It was summer 2020 (and let’s face it—who has a great memory of summer 2020?). I wasn’t yet back on antipsychotics (by weeks to months), I was facing a pandemic, a world on fire, the recent death of my grandmother, and the one year anniversary of discovering my father’s death (leading to PTSD). I was mostly lost in a creative haze, spending hours every day on the swingset at the nearest park in heat over 110*F—dissociatively daydreaming up new plotlines with a song on repeat—or curled up in the fetal position on the floor in my office, near catatonic and hallucinating. It was A Time.

However, it was one of the most prolific periods of my life. After spending most of a year after my father’s death pouring emotions into Contrivance, my primary fiction project of almost a decade, instead of sleeping at night, I was (mostly) taking a break from Contrivance’s dystopian doom and gloom that now seemed all too realistic, focusing on what I thought would be a quick, simple side project to perk me up, which eventually became the I’ll Give You series, my first real foray into erotica, which now has four books published and more in the works (spoiler alert: not a quick, simple, or always cheery side project after all).

And, I started The Schizophrenia Diaries, after having casually maintained a different blog for about a year. My first post wasn’t about writing or creativity at all. It was about Farrah, my so called schizophrenia tamagotchi, my recurring golden retriever puppy hallucination, who had recently come about. From there, I wrote about all manner of mental health related things for about six months, essays as ideas came up, then floundered a little on what to do with the blog. I was back on meds, and out of therapy. Vaccines were on the horizon. The election was over. I’d recently gotten married and published my first book. Things were good, and while I was grateful, I wasn’t sure what to write about now; without acute symptoms to reflect on, I got a little lost. Things on the blog slowed down, and I didn’t make a post in 2021 until mid April.

I had thought about it in the meantime. I didn’t really want to abandon the blog. Schizophrenia is highly stigmatized and misunderstood. Stories of schizophrenics are rarely told at all, and even more rarely do we get to tell our stories ourselves. I felt it was important—part of something bigger than me—to write on it. But, the blog was neglected when I was doing well, which gave me mixed feelings on it, and I wasn’t sure what I had left to say. I thought that maybe I needed more of a theme, an angle, something to ground the project besides processing symptoms as they arose.

I reread some early posts on the blog. What grabbed me was my last post before things really slowed down, a September post before two more that December and then silence for four months. It was about psychosis as a part of my writing process, how my schizophrenia and my colloquial tortured artist syndrome intertwined, about how my psychotic daydreams fueled my writing, how the darkness of the things I tended to write about both contradicted my triggers and calmed me down, and so on.

That. That was my angle. Because even when my symptoms improved, they were still there—and the most cohesive way I could talk about them was through how they impacted my creative processes. No matter what, I was always writing. I always had that to talk about.

With reframing and revising, things picked up on the blog again, even as my mental health has largely been okay.

That said, The Schizophrenia Diaries is my home base for talking about psychosis and creativity, art, writing.

But what about psychosis and productivity?

I mentioned that one of the worst time periods in my life as far as symptoms was also one of my most prolific—how does that work?

There’s definitely a balance.

After having made it without meds for about two years, when I started again, the first night I took Seroquel—well, firstly, it knocked me out so unexpectedly hard and fast I fell out of my chair at my desk—the change was immediate. For a few days, I was basically symptom free. It was almost like I didn’t have schizophrenia, overnight. I realized how bad my sleep had been—which didn’t help anything. It had been so bad, I realized, as Seroquel knocked me out at night, I wondered if I could chalk almost everything that year up to sleep deprivation, the miracle of Seroquel to the miracle of sleep, more than its use as an antipsychotic.

But during those few days, I felt… conflicted.

When Farrah—the dog who’s not real, mind you—found out—when I decided—that I was likely going back on meds, she worked those puppy dog eyes real hard. Why would you want to get rid of me, Mom? I tried to telepathically communicate to her that as far as I was concerned, I was happy to keep her, if I could get rid of the corpse and the blaring music and the black blobs and the flashes of light and the white noise and the maggots and all of the other issues. Later, I came to realize that Farrah—this is my current working theory, at least—represents the part of my mind that wants to be psychotic, freely creative without the limits of pesky reality.

During those first few days after Seroquel, I felt… a little empty. Numbed. Better than I had in months, maybe a year, in certain ways, but… something was missing. My daydreams were missing, my fiction fuel—they were back in the normal human range. It was like watching a movie on a decades old television versus watching it in IMAX 3D. I couldn’t get reality to go away entirely even when I tried—and normally, I didn’t have to try; in fact, normally, I had to fight to get back when my alarm went off telling me it was time to make dinner or something, nudging me out of daydreams.

Despite how well I seemed to be doing, I wondered if I might lower the dosage.

But, my body quickly adjusted. A few days later, I could sink into my daydreams that deeply again, but I had some more control over starting, and I didn’t have to fight quite as hard to stop. Other symptoms stayed improved but didn’t vanish. And, not lost in the daydream stage forever, it was easier to get out when I wanted, to grab a pen, and start putting daydreams on paper. But things can get pretty bad—lots and lots of time lost in fantasy on the verge of hallucination, not quite in my control—before I stop getting to the part where I write them down. After meds, I was overall less prolific, except for a few really, really bad parts of that prior year or so.

However, that was just about writing. I thrived in other areas like I never had before, where psychosis was mostly a burden. It’s not much of an advantage as far as being a housewife, a landlord, a butler school student, an alternative sexuality educator, a group organizer, or even a nonfiction writer (overall, my blogging writing has picked up since). In fact, those last three non writing areas were all things I seriously picked up within a year after meds for the first time. I found more balance. I wrote a little less (we’re still talking frequently upwards of 25,000 words per month), but I did everything else that was productive a little more, more than enough to fill the gap.

I see this psychosis equals creativity but lack of balance thing in my past, too. My schizophrenia was early onset. My symptoms first appeared around my fifteenth birthday, mid ninth grade. I was producing writing like crazy—even winning multiple rounds of National Novel Writing Month per year (this means writing upwards of 50,000 words in a month—many times, I got closer to 100k). However, school wasn’t going so well. I dropped out before the end of tenth grade. Now, I see why I was writing fiction like crazy while failing to turn in five-hundred word essays that weren’t word salad gibberish, or be non catatonic long enough to show up to class, or finish taking a test without yelling at demons only I could see.

So are there pros to schizophrenia for productivity, for me, as a fiction author? Yes. In other areas? Less so that I see right now, though I frequently joke that my general, various anxious neuroses are the edge that keeps me moving so quickly, lest I die tomorrow. Are there cons? Of course. Many. Still, I wouldn’t quite hit the cure button, for myself.

It’s just, as many other things are, about balance.

On Conflating Skinny and Productive

It’s a long story, and, while crucial background, it’s not the main point of this post, so to give a quick summary: I’m schizophrenic, I’m a fiction writer, my line between character and self is a fine one, I kind of absorb my characters’ traits with time, I accidentally sort of, kind of absorbed one of my characters’ anorexia.

(That was a lot. I know. Bear with me.)

Seeking support, I joined a few online communities for people with eating disorders. One discussion topic I saw posted really got my mental gears spinning:

Why do you really want to be skinny?

Because eating disorders aren’t really about food.

The answers held all kinds of insights. To be desirable, or even lovable. To feel in control. To make their struggle visible. To be special, or good at something, or have an identity as the skinny friend. To prevent aging. To fit in with their gender identity. To self harm via starvation. To cope with prior food insecurity. To take up less space in the world.

And what does skinny really represent to me?

Productive.

I wasn’t the only one, either. It’s not too hard to see where the idea comes from.

My romanticized toxic ideal was the workaholic who’s too busy for meals, who happily gets wrapped up in work and forgets to eat, who’s a little nauseous with stress and excitement and caffeine, who turns to long walks or runs as moving meditation and to burn off nervous or excited energy, the tortured artist who self neglects. That image is common in media. Even I’d written that before.

And I fell into that somewhat organically. But when the organic level only took me so far, forgetting to eat in a fit of inspiration became “forgetting” to eat as I stared at the wall, thinking only of food. I chased the external look anyway. Fake it till you make it mentality. I wanted to be that. I knew it wasn’t entirely healthy, but most tropes come with both pros and cons, and the pros were things I’m a sucker for: extreme productivity, psychosis influenced creativity, passion on the verge of obsession.

But the cons were big Catch-22s. It’s hard to be productive when you’re hungry, when all your energy is going to re-counting calories and exercising, when you’re scrolling eating disorder memes to cope.

And if what skinny meant to me was productive, could I lose the obsession with skinny by focusing on productive itself? By telling myself I needed to eat in order to be productive, that productive was the important part of skinny?

Kind of. That’s been my most convincing thought process when I need to reconnect with why I’m recovering. I’m not sure if recovering is the word, but at least mostly trying to turn down the urges for disordered eating. But eating disorders—especially ones born of psychosis—aren’t quite that simple.

And the skinny equals productive image is still out there. I recently threw myself back into productive—not just being productive on my actual projects, but reconnecting with my passion for productivity itself. I drafted and taught a webinar on the subject with great results, and got some fresh reading material on productivity, as I started this blog.

But something keeps catching my eye in the productivity books I’m reading. When talking about goals, weight loss keeps coming up as an example. Creating a habit of eating healthier, or less. Exercising more. Even routine weigh ins seem to come up constantly in morning routine lists, food logging in information system ideas. The idea of eating sweets only as a self reward (and not as a reward for weight loss).

All things I’m mostly trying to do the opposite of now, because I’d gone too far.

And why do those things need to keep coming up? Why is there the assumption that someone reading a book on productivity wants to lose weight, eat less, exercise more, weigh themselves more, think about food more, treat food as a reward? There are so many other ways to be productive. Can people who are already in a healthy place—or too far down the other end of the spectrum—not be interested in this book on productivity?

I’m using the techniques these books teach to do the opposite of their examples, and eat. To stop losing weight at a rapid pace and stay in a healthy range, to stop exercising before I pass out, to not hop back on the scale every thirty minutes, to not count calories, to not think of food as a reward for starvation.

Why can’t the go-to example be anything else that’s actually tied to productivity for people in a normal, healthy place?

Then again, normal and healthy aren’t necessarily the same in this case. Just look at the stats of the average American’s weight and how they feel about it, versus the ideals. I get that, and the books may be targeted at normal. And, given that many of these books are also classified as self help, they may assume that there’s some kind of problem. Still, there are other examples like that out there. Why must we continue subtly conflating skinny and productive? Why must I?

Things to think about.