Your bandwidth for bulls#!t

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In 1926, Lorenz Peter Elfred Freuchen was on an Arctic expedition when a terrible storm forced him to take cover under his dog sled. The Danish explorer folded all six feet, seven inches of his burly self under the makeshift shelter, while snow and ice turned the whole thing into a dome of frozen white. He was trapped. Hours passed. I assume he contemplated certain death during that time.

But he didn’t die. Instead, he pooped. Freuchen defecated into his hand, waited for it to freeze, then whittled the poo-cicle into a dagger that he then used to chip away at the ice tomb and escape.

Freuchen went on to write books and articles, edit a magazine, and fight the Nazis. He even appeared in an Oscar-winning movie, based on one of his books. He started his own movie production company, founded the Adventurer’s Club of Denmark, and won $64,000 on an American TV game show.

The man was a badass. But also, this one time, he pooped in his hand. Which adds a certain panache to his story, I think.

Now it feels very weird to insert myself after subscribing this legendary human, but stick with me here.

Let’s talk about the bullsh!t we deal with when we’re working really hard on our journeys to greatness.

Last year I was getting a bunch of assignments from a publication I didn’t love working for. The topics were dense but they wanted very short articles. With two to three expert sources, whose titles took up half the word count. Also, make it voice-y!

The assigned length gave these articles a technically decent per-word rate, but I had to spend so much additional time whittling words away while trying to preserve some of the “voice-ier” sections, tweaking and rearranging sentences to squeeze everything in there. Which is actually a great practice for improving your writing—but arguably unnecessary when the article is going on the internet and there’s plenty of room for an extra 200 words to help properly explain the topic at hand. Anyways.

I’d submit the piece and at least two editors would offer feedback that often conflicted with the other. Once I addressed all their questions, the darn thing would be 900 words anyways.

Every assignment felt like a guaranteed headache. But they answered my pitches and consistently gave me work. So I stuck with it—kept pitching and writing and whittling words.

A friend of mine was writing for the same publication. We would often compare notes on the frustrating expectations, late payments, and snarky editorial comments, confirming that they were indeed pretty terrible to work for.

She stopped writing for them, and I kept going.

Part of me felt weird about my willingness to keep dealing with the particular bullsh!t at this publication. She was demanding better—why wasn’t I? Did I not have as high expectations for myself and my work? Was I contributing to the poor treatment of other freelancers by continuing to hand in articles when my last invoice from two months ago hadn’t been paid?