Nadia Eghbal, someone who obviously loves writing, writes about writing a book. It sounds less… enjoyable than you might think.

What I hated most about this past year was feeling unable to seriously think about anything besides this one thing. Everything I read or talked about was in service to the thing. There was nothing but the thing.

Afterwards, I expected to feel a satisfying sense of completion, but mostly I just felt relieved. I didn’t think of it as having finished a manuscript so much as having expelled a virus from my body.