I have no muscles that have developed through play or the immediate need to survive—just countable reps. I write a certain number of words today; I answer a certain number of emails today; I do a certain number of lunges. I lunge—“a sudden thrust forward of the body,” as if to seize prey—and then I retract without grasping anything in my jaws. Just the lunge and the act of lunging. A certain number of lunges. A certain number of calories. A certain number of recreation hours. And then the day is over.

A is very productive, too. He gets work done. Only he doesn’t seem to exalt it as his ordering principle for being alive. Taking a day off can be nice for him; the meaning of life does not disintegrate as soon as the disciplinary structure is removed. He doesn’t panic as I do when interrupted at the desk, because you can’t interrupt something that isn’t sacred. Free time does not provoke an existential spiral. For me, anything that isn’t quantifiable productivity can only be construed as procrastination. There’s no “life” that is not a means to an end of —?

One way to make sure I’ve done my reps for the day is to keep lists of all my tasks. Everything goes on the same list because everything has to get done. Shower, eat, write a friend, write a colleague, talk about my feelings, call my dad, write an email, write an essay, write a diary, write a new list of tasks.

Something on my list that is not work, but that is on the same list and so has become ontologically flattened into work, is to record a video message for my friend’s birthday. Given the quarantine situation, her kind husband has invited almost a hundred people to upload pictures and videos to an app where she’ll be able to watch them on her birthday. It’s possible to see what other people have uploaded so far. Before recording a video, I watch some of the other video messages. One of our mutual friends has made a lovely one: she’s sitting in a bathtub and extolling the virtues of the birthday girl, whom she dubs the Queen of Pleasure. I smile. It’s true! This friend is wonderfully adept at enjoying life. She knows how to live in a body in time, how to maximize joy as its own end, and I dearly love this about her. I get emotional thinking about friends I haven’t seen in so long, who are all Queens of something. The Queen of Finding the Hilarious. The Queen of Even Keel. The Queen of Gathering Us Together. The Queen of Optimism and Ambition. I must be a Queen of some kind, too, I think. What Queen am I? The Queen of Time Management. The Queen of Third Draft of an Essay. It is I, the Queen of Reps.

Some of my classmates were probably geniuses. Others managed to parlay the genius myth to their advantage. Others were just rich or from famous families, so it didn’t matter. Others were ahead of me in a different way: they understood that creative work also happens when your ass is not in the chair and they saw no purpose in self-punishment. And others were probably working as hard as I was and just not making such a big deal out of it. They realized that artists are not supposed to look like we’re toiling this hard. Our labor is supposed to be mysterious exceptional labor, in service of making exceptional timeless objects, etc.

We know we need to get out of the house. We rent a car and drive to the beach, to the Rockaways. The shore is cold and windy on the day we’ve chosen, but it’s gloriously empty. The sunlight is yellow in the early afternoon and the pale water dissolves into pale sky where there should be a horizon line. A reads a book and I sit a few feet away, scooping sand with my feet and chatting on the phone with a friend in California (even though I feel like I should be reading, too, because reading a certain number of pages counts as a certain number of reps).

A magazine asks me to write a short piece in response to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, a series of texts Calvino wrote in the 1980s about the qualities he believes are unique to literature and which will carry us through the next millennium. My assignment is to write about his first memo on “Lightness,” in which he says you can’t write about this heavy world with a heavy hand; you have to treat the gnarly stuff with delicacy and wit.

The belief that work will be there for me even if all else falls apart is also part of my inheritance. After every breakup or rejection I call my mom in tears in order to receive her reliable instruction to work through it. She tells me to write about my feelings and to channel my energy into other projects. I must not give up, I must process and parse the mess, I must harvest meaning from it, I must find my way back to myself through laboring by myself. I must gain recognition elsewhere to remind me that I exist, even when there is no lover to assure me. And she’s right: work always works. Work will always take me back.

One of my art teachers in college sympathized with my inability to leave the studio until I made something good (with no criteria for what that would be). He said the problem was that I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to let things flow. He said I was too worried about what people would think. He passed on a piece of advice, advice that John Cage once gave to Philip Guston:

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.

I get the lesson: it takes a lot of time to learn to rid oneself of other people’s opinions and voices and create something that isn’t about pleasing anyone or getting attention. The lesson is that a true artist makes work for no one else but—no one? Posterity? The lesson is that good work comes from within. I used to find this a helpful image, but now it creeps me out. Who is this person with no body behind her? One unknown woman slides further and further into another . . .