“Slow feels delightful. It feels painful. It feels impossible. It feels miraculous.” Or so Rachel Schwartzmann writes in one of the many bite-sized essays that populate her new nonfiction collection, Slowing, an artful guide to so-called “slow living.” I believe in the delight Schwartzmann posits, but when we meet over Zoom in August, I confess that I get stuck on the “impossible.” In my experience, “slow living” has appealed in concept but eluded in practice. “Slow living”—a lifestyle movement as important and (often) nebulous as “self-care”—is about the act of operating in a community with intentionality, balance, and reflection, just as much as it’s about seeking quiet, calm, and rest. Time cannot be chased; it can only be appreciated. But there’s no easy answer as to how that appreciation should or might manifest.
For Schwartzmann, the appreciation (and the ensuing slowness) arrived only after she’d closed the business she’d spent nearly a decade building. As a high school student in 2011, she’d launched a Tumblr style blog called The Style Line, a project she’d started as a scheme to impress college admissions boards. But the site quickly outgrew its original ambitions. Soon, Schwartzmann—still a teenager—had inadvertently joined one of the earliest classes of online content creators. She was welcomed into the Tumblr offices and accredited as the company’s New York Fashion Week correspondent. Before she’d reached her junior year at FIT, The Style Line had grown to the point that Schwartzmann dropped out of college and relaunched the blog as a “boutique content company,” complete with a publishing arm (profiling creatives about “sustainability, entrepreneurship, and activism, but through a style and creativity lens”) and an agency arm (consulting for brands and editorial platforms).
But by 2018, she was already approaching burnout. “I wondered if anybody else who had been so online as I had been was feeling really fatigued,” Schwartzmann says. She decided to close The Style Line in May 2020, and in its stead, she hard-launched a podcast called Slow Stories, for which she interviewed creatives about what “slowing down” actually meant to them—hoping it might steer her down her own path toward “slow living.” Later that year, she sent in a book proposal for what would become Slowing. Both projects were as much for her own self-discovery as for her eventual audience’s.
“I think, for a long time, I had conflated content and storytelling,” Schwartzmann says. “I felt ready to step into my ability as a writer and really start understanding the craft.” Slowing—a book, like so many, that attempts to pin language to an abstract sensation—combines memoir, interview, and instruction for a volume that feels more like an invitation than a guide. Schwartzmann felt it was important for the book not to feel prescriptive. It is not a self-help book, nor is she a guru. She wanted, only, to coax her readers to recognize slowing itself as something essential, powerful, and transformative—rather like time itself.
Ahead, Schwartzmann discusses her response to why “slowing” can feel so unfeasible; her thoughts on “slow living” as aesthetic intrigue; and why she feels storytelling is the first step to true balance.
How would you define “slowing”? I think it’s a concept we all might understand intrinsically, but it’s difficult to pinpoint an actual definition.
Slowness, I’ve come to understand it as being synonymous with self-awareness and with reflection. Because I don’t know if it’s enough to tell people simply to just “slow down.” It’s hard, in this day and age, and we all have responsibilities, and I think “slow living” has been added into this narrative of, maybe, you have to move out of a city and go live in the country. I don’t want to reduce “slowing” to that, either.
I don’t know if [slowing] is as big as we’ve made it out to be. I think it’s really individual to the person and their circumstances, as these movements tend to be. For me, storytelling is wellness and slowness. I feel the most slow or engaged or present when I’m engaged with story and narrative, whether I’m speaking with somebody about theirs or telling my own or reading.
Tell me about the process of piecing together the essays and interviews for the book. How did you decide what to include, who to reach out to, which stories were the best fit?
The book was originally meant to be a collection of interviews. It took me up until finding my publisher and editor to realize that I could speak on this subject as well. I think I wasn’t ready to step into my writing yet. I had a little bit of imposter syndrome.
I’ll start with the essays: Those were really an opportunity for me to pose the questions that I’d been asking my interviewees [for years] to myself, and to really reflect. I took recurring questions from the podcast, or things that I was talking about in conversation, and let that be a prompt for me.
I wanted to write about ordinary things. I’d been living a life that was so much about the extraordinary and the glamour, and I felt so disconnected from daily beauty. To have a space to write about that, to celebrate it, to slow down and give it its due, was really important to me.
In terms of the interviewees, I was lucky that everybody I reached out to pretty much agreed to participate. I wanted to speak with people who had something to say about slowing down, but maybe we hadn’t seen them speak about it. We knew them for something else. What I’ve learned as an interviewer is that, a lot of times, people feel like they can only speak about one thing—or that they’re only going to be respected for speaking about one thing. I wanted these interviews to be a space to talk about the things that they don’t always have the opportunity to.
I gave them a framework: “I want to talk to you about a beginning, middle, and end, and how you define these things.” People told me, after, that it felt like therapy a lot of the time.
I was thinking about the concept of “slowing”—slow living, slow storytelling—in my own life. And I realized my knee-jerk reaction to the idea is that, if I do it, I’ll be punished for it. Whether personally, professionally, financially, socially, et cetera. What’s your response to that concern? When people express that fear, what do you say?
Societally, we’ve arrived at a point where people are going to talk and have opinions on everything. I’ve reached a point where, if what I’m doing upsets someone but it has nothing to do with them, that’s their story. That doesn’t involve me.
With slowing down, I think there is now a bit more room in the conversation: People are more open to it, especially on the work front. We’re seeing all of these movements culminate; people want to make big systemic changes.
Everybody’s going to have a different response to somebody’s change in pace. But I’ve really learned that slowing down is a private thing. I don’t know if you owe someone an explanation on how you’re thinking about pace. And it’s hard because, in this landscape, everything’s up for grabs, especially if you’re sharing online or connected to that space in any way.
Just because I closed The Style Line doesn’t mean I don’t still engage with fashion and style. Just because I want to slow down doesn’t mean I’m going to leave New York. Some people might look at that and be like, “Well, you’re not doing it correctly.” For me, slowing down is something that starts in practice rather than performance. It’s not a linear thing. It’s going to ebb and flow. I can’t be slow all the time, and I don’t think that’s healthy. But I think getting to a place where you can recognize that you are slowing down, and that it feels okay, is such a big shift—it gives you a sense of agency that I think a lot of other parts of life don’t.
This is going to sound like a basic question, but I’m curious about your answer. What is the benefit of slowing down? What have you experienced in your own life after “slowing”?
Gratitude, creativity, better connection with my body. Sometimes, when you’re in that state [of transition], it’s positive, but you don’t realize it yet. You can feel really uncomfortable. Even in those moments, I’m grateful for them, because I realize some shift is happening.
As soon as I signed the book deal for this and got started, it culminated in a bit of a mental health crisis for me. This was [spring of] 2022; I hadn’t really processed the effects of the pandemic, or really closing The Style Line, and was dealing with some strange health things. It’s fine now, but they were random and unexpected. Something hit me as soon as I started writing: “Okay, I’m going to have to be slow. I’m writing about slowness, but it’s going to hurt for a bit.”
The book was really an anchor. So, I guess, the benefit of slowing down is it’s going to show you things you maybe wanted to turn away from but ultimately you need to face. It’s hard, but I think it’s necessary work.
I want to ask about the aesthetic nature of something like “slowing.” When it becomes an aesthetic concept—one that inspires TikTok videos and mood boards—is there concern that the movement becomes more about the look than the practice? Is it a fad? How do you keep “slowing” from becoming just another -core?
I don’t know if we can, and I don’t think that’s the point. I think all of the time and energy spent trying to prove it’s not becoming a trend or a fad is distracting us from actually making changes.
Interesting.
I have an aesthetic, and I like beauty, and I respond to those things. I also know a lot of the zeitgeist is out of my control, and sometimes these trends take on a life of their own. That seems inevitable to me, in a lot of ways, in our digital age.
Where the slowness comes in is being discerning about what you’re seeing and how it applies to your own life, and maybe not feeling the pressure to conform to that “aesthetic” or to let it distract you from slowing down in a way that fits your lifestyle. “Slowing” might become an aesthetic, but you’ll know when it’s more than that. You’ll feel it.
Let’s say someone is interested in the concept of slowing down, is committed to taking the steps to do so, but isn’t sure where to begin. What advice would you give them?
Read Slowing. [Laughs.] No. Take inventory of your story and where you are, whether that’s writing it down, taking photos, drawing. When you get a strong grasp of where you are and how you define certain chapters of your life, it makes it a little—I don’t want to say easier, but more accessible to think about slowing down.
I think the tendency is often to go back to the timelines that have been drilled in our minds. “You need to be married by this age, have kids by this age.” Unlearning some of that. When you narrate your own story back to yourself, you can see how much you’ve overcome and how much you’ve done and how much room you have to make changes. Just tell your story to yourself: What is it, and how did it get you to this point?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.