2023: the Year of Doing Less

And getting more done, annoyingly

Welcome to the very first edition of (Nobody Likes Your) Ornaments Club. Thank you very much for joining me.

The name comes from a song called Ornaments off my first album, Last Decade of Love. It’s a cautionary tale of hoarding things instead of living life, and it comes with a fun video. You can watch the video below, but only once you’ve finished your homework (i.e. reading this newsletter).

The first rule of Ornaments Club is - tell EVERYONE. Talk about Ornaments Club all the time, especially to strangers. 

The second rule of Ornaments Club is - it will likely be late, or slightly different from what I set out to do. This is the TSarzi way. Imperfection is a constant work in progress.

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Better Late Than New Year

Sorry it’s late but here it is anyway feels like an apt way to start. I meant to get this up and running before Christmas. Christmas came and went. No matter, I thought - a new publication for a new year! The weeks rolled on. Now here we are in the penultimate weekend of January (on a Sunday evening no less), and at last I get to it. 

But I think the end of January is a very honest time of year, and really the perfect time to begin something you mean to continue. The bright hope of a brand new year has lost its gleam, reality has started to bite, and all the resolutions are dead, or in their final throes. Good. This is when the real work can begin. 

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TL:DR - Do less, it’s fine. You’ll probably end up doing more. 

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Resolutions are trash and so are you

Ever since I went off to uni, a bright-eyed naif hoping to Make Something Of Myself In The World, I have loved Resolutions Season. While everyone else was celebrating the clock hands moving in the usual direction and bursting into spontaneous renditions of auld lang syne, I would be gleefully thinking of all the things I could put on my list this year.  

Each year, the resolutions would look something like this:

• Write (great) novel [and inevitably win the Booker]

• Play violin more

• Learn the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (it’s a total b*stard)

• Learn French [or German]

• Accomplish many other things that will finally make me worthwhile in the face of the world and rescue me from my current state of existence

Each year went about as well as you would expect. I have still not finished a novel, or ever learnt the Beethoven. English is still the only language I can really speak, and I am still existing in my current life. 

It’s almost as if drafting a solely achievement-based bullet list of a hyper productive ideal Me wasn’t a reliable strategy for growth at all. 

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Busy doing nothing

Last year, I did far less. Much of this was not my idea. I got ill almost straight away, and once one sickness had his foot in the door he invited all his friends. Plans fell through, and work. The year I had mapped out for myself - the one where I built a reliable freelance income and toured my new show across the country and recorded the album and worked on numerous side projects and yes, wrote the great novel, and lost the lockdown weight - didn’t materialise. 

Instead of stepping into a new expansive show-up-and-take-no-prisoners maximise-your-life version of me, I found myself engaging even less than before. I didn’t have enough fuel in the tank to do all the things I thought I should be doing, so instead I had to stick with the essentials: the things that had to get done, and the things I enjoyed. There was really no point in doing things only because they looked good - the cost of lost days and depleted energy was too high. 

Life became far more still and quiet. The overachiever in me panicked - the me who only knew how to measure myself by how visible I was and who could only be visible when she had something to show for it. I was going too slowly already, and getting too old too quickly - surely the race was on to get my strength back, to get back up to speed and Get Back Out There? Tempus fugit, and all that jazz. 

It is alarming, when you have only known how to value yourself by the things you do, to be confronted with the fact that you simply cannot do a lot. To suddenly realise that some ultra-productive supersonic version of you is not going to miraculously emerge from the wings and take you to the life you’re supposed to have. 

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Life in the Slow Lane

But in this slow version of the year, which looked nothing like my resolutions list, I discovered two things. I thought I already knew these two things but it turned out I had actually been quite bad at them. 

The first was saying no. I literally had no reserves for anything that wasn’t essential - so if it wasn’t either vital or enjoyable, I didn’t do it. I said no to many gigs, and most social events. I stopped writing the novel I was supposedly writing, because I could see that, much as I loved talking about it and thinking about my characters, I was writing very little of it. I stopped chasing every creative opportunity going, because applications not only take time, they take huge reserves of thought and energy, and often they take a little part of your dreams and there is only so much of your heart you can throw forward into the future each year without expecting anything back.    

The second was remembering what I actually liked. It was quite hard, having thought of myself as a self-aware soul leading a creative life, to realise how little connection I had with things that made me happy, day to day. 

I started to read again - things I wanted to, not things I thought I should. I remembered the joy of learning new things. I let myself buy books and take a long time to read them - books on Arthurian legend, on Tarot, on the use of brackets as reading aids in mediaeval poetry manuscripts. I learnt about a fascinating woman called Emma Hamilton and I started writing a new show about her. I went to Prague and spent a month ambling round museums and writing in cafes (I know, I know. A variety of factors made this possible and I am very grateful that it happened. I’m a jammy sod). 

I stopped asking for outcomes on things immediately - or at all. I barely put any of it on social media. When I had ideas - and I had a lot - I resisted the familiar urge to try and put them into action straightaway, like tiny business proposals for Dragons Den. I began to ease into the terrifying notion that the things worth doing would come together in their own time and that I could be ok with losing the rest. (Sacrilege! Outrage!). 

The good little capitalist-conditioned part of my brain took this as complacency (and still shouts at me most days) - but the awful fact is, I had a much nicer year and I actually think I made more progress. 

Making space 

This time last January, if you had laid out the two versions of 2022 and asked me which one I would like - the slow sleepy B road or the ultra-productive accomplishment motorway - of course I would have plumped for the motorway. In a Porsche, in the overtaking lane, probably breaking the speed limit and driving right up the arse of the car in front (take that, responsible road user!). 

Of course I would have. I think most of us want to go fast and most of us have more ideas than we have time to accomplish them. And so we think in terms of accomplishment, constantly. 

But my year of doing less, though imposed more than chosen, actually panned out much better than the one I had planned. 

Now the Humblebrag part

I did very few gigs but each one raised my game significantly. I tried new songs to new audiences, played on a Steinway grand piano once and tried out a whole new mode of performance in my hybrid show Gone to the Dogs. 

I applied for far fewer opportunities, but the ones I did go for helped me articulate the kind of things I want to explore in future. Even if I didn’t get them, I learned what direction I want to go in, the kinds of work I want to create - and what I need to do to get there. 

I didn’t finish a manuscript or get published, but I did write most days - and by showing up regularly and quietly, following my nose, collating notes and letting what needed to be written come to the surface instead of dictating it from the start, I have the bones of something that will become in time whatever it needs to be. Even better - I finally trust myself to get there.  

At the end of December I was awarded a grant from the Arts Council to focus on developing my creative practice. This is the biggest funding award I’ve ever received and the bulk of what it is paying for is time. For an artist - and I think really we are all artists in some form - I think time is the most essential thing. Time to dream, to fail, and create. Time is what we spend our lives working to afford. 

I don’t think I would have got that grant without my year of doing less. I don’t think I could have put together the proposal that I did, or nurtured the new ideas and curiosities that sit at the heart of it. That well-argued, unique and purposeful plan of action owes a lot to daydreaming and idle hours spent reading old books that aren’t on anyone’s bestseller list. And wandering around Prague looking at castles and learning about history (sorry).

Resolutions are trash but you are not 

It’s the end of the third week of January and we are miserable. If you’ve managed to stick to your resolutions, well done you, but also, f**k off and we hate you. 

But in the much more likely scenario that your plans are already going awry, and this whole new year new you malarkey is starting to lose its sparkle, I hope you might use this as a point to reconsider what you’re expecting of yourself in 2023. 

The word resolution comes from its root resolve, which actually means to disintegrate or loosen up - so I have no idea what business it has holding so many people in a bind each year. Screw you, Resolution, you catfished us. 

In this consumerist capitalism hellhole of infinite productivity tips and the false promise that, if you only Do More, you’ll finally Be Enough, I hope you might have the audacity to expect less of yourself this year. 

Allow yourself more time to do less - I promise you, you’ll get more done. 

News Bulletin 

The big news is that my show Gone to the Dogs is coming to the wonderful VAULT Festival in London at the end of February. This is my show about England and nostalgia that I developed during lockdown. A mix of music and theatre (yet somehow, crucially, not musical theatre), it has been described by audiences so far as:

Immersive and brilliant

Truly the work of an eccentric genius

Nothing like any performance I've seen before

Like a Dali painting

No one was paid to say this - in fact, all of them had paid ME to be there.

More details and buy tickets via the VAULT website

Gone to the Dogs will be on at the Flair Ground for two weekends:

25-26 Feb & 4-5 March.

It’s quite a large venue and I’ve already started on the good old fever dreams about one person turning up, so if you are in London or know people in London, please do come. I’ll do the show whatever, but it really is too intense an experience for a one person audience - some poor soul also wrote on their feedback form:

I wasn’t expecting something so dark, confrontational and intense.

So if we can get it to at least 3 each night we’ll be grand. 

That’s it for this time, thanks for reading. I’ll be back in your inbox in a couple of weeks. I hope to be shorter next time. x