I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself – I hadn’t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven’t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day of my free agent life, and the 2nd day that I’m not at work. It’s 850am – I woke up naturally, without any alarm. I feel a pretty strong impulse to check Twitter (because I know there are surely notifications waiting for me), but I’m trying to make sure that I write and finish this vomit first before I start checking on those things.
Here’s a worry I had – I had written a bunch of essay ideas on my whiteboard a few days (weeks?) ago. I took pictures of them so that I would be able to follow up on them as necessary. I hoped that each one would be able to be written as a word vomit. When I looked at them a couple of days ago, however, I found myself feeling a little trapped. I felt like many of those essays would have required reading and research, and I didn’t quite feel up to it at the time. And I worried, just for a moment, that maybe I’m not a writer.
What a silly, cursed thought. There is truth in that experience, but it isn’t in the conclusion. What it reveals to me is that there’s some writing that flows very naturally without any sort of research or reading, and there’s some writing that needs to be grounded in research – because I’m writing about things that I don’t completely understand, things that require facts and context that I don’t have readily available in my head.
I have developed a pretty good mechanism for writing about that sort of thing: the twitter thread. There’s something about the 280characters + 4 pictures per tweet format that forces me to write in a way that’s practical, sensible, digestible. (Aaaand this was where I hopped over to Twitter and spent about an hour there, probably. Now it’s 1020am.)
So. Where was I. Yes. I want to write lots of word vomits. But I don’t want to repeat the same thing over and over again. That said, there’s a limited range of things that I can talk about at length without having to pause over and over again. So what do I do?
First of all, I think doing status updates – I’m talking about emotional states, psychological states – is something that would be useful and somewhat novel since I haven’t done these in a while.
Actually, what I’m seeing myself say here is that I should just write about all of my feelings as much as I can. Because that’s one thing that I haven’t spent a lot of time with, and it’s something that I can talk about at length. Maybe I should go through each emotion one by one – I talked about sadness recently. What about all the others? Yes. I want to do that! I want to get to know myself better. I want to feel all the feelings, and catalogue them, and make sense of them. I also want to clear out all my notes and todo list items. I will work on that after publishing this vomit.
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I stopped this vomit halfway and I didn’t get back to it until a couple of days later. What is the overall gist of what I had written in the previous half? “Do status updates”? “Use formats and contexts to help you think better”? Was I trying to motivate myself? Face up to your fear of not-writing, and… accept it. Don’t deny it. Realize that what you’re trying to do is harder than you thought it was. If it was going to be easy, you would already have done it. Having more freedom doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to start doing it effortlessly. The reason you weren’t doing it was because it required more effort than you could have mustered. And now you have more time and energy, so theoretically you should be able to expend more effort. But it’s still scary and intimidating to try something harder than anything you’ve tried before.
So the message is this – brace yourself for effort-shock, and decide to power through it. This sounds awfully close to “just do it”, which I suppose is the ultimate distillation of the idea here. But there’s a reason why I chose to get more nuanced (and to be honest, part of that reason is always to avoid confronting the simple-but-hard solution of :just do it”). I already have several vomits that are in the spirit of “just fucking do it”. But… do what? Expend your energy writing more essays about how you should Just Do It? That’s a frustrating sort of circle-jerk that doesn’t accomplish anything. So what do you want to accomplish? Clarify that. I want to build a tribe. What tribe? Towards what end? I want to expand global human consciousness. Okay, now there’s a horizon worth looking at. What’s the first step towards that? I think Twitter threads are a good place to start, since I’ve somehow amassed a bit of a following over there. Twitter threads that get people thinking, seeing better.
In some sense, this word vomit project has kind of… achieved it’s original purpose, maybe. But I still have 300,000 words to go, so I need to imagine something new and different. I think I would like the remainder of these vomits to explore my emotional landscape, my psychological landscape, my fears, desires, wants, goals, feelings, worries, anxieties. These are things that I can talk about at length without having to do any research. That isn’t a cop out – it’s not that I want to avoid research-driven writing, I definitely want to do more of that. But I don’t think this is the place for it. So I will write that elsewhere.
Now, what’s a title to summaries all of this? Clarify your goals, expect effort-shock, take concrete steps every day.