It’s 519am. I should go to bed like a couple of hours ago but I feel like writing a word vomit. It looks like I haven’t published one of these since the start of 2021. There was a time when I used to publish these things daily, sometimes multiple posts a day. But then eventually I started shifting all my time and energy to twitter.
There are a few parts to this. One is that I started to feel like these word vomits were getting repetitive, and I wanted to do a sort of big picture research review of the whole project. I’ve made some progress on that – I do the reading in my public roam, and I made a video about the first 250,000 words. I’ll want to do videos for 500,000 and 750,000 too, and then finish the project and do one for 1,000,000 – and maybe a separate overview of some kind.
Two – I haven’t made as much progress on the rereading and reviewing as I’d like, partially because I’m working on my 2nd ebook INTROSPECT – and I’ve found book writing to be heck of a psychological ordeal for me. I avoid it all the time. I struggle with it. It’s hard. Sometimes I just think about writing the book and I immediately feel like taking a nap, which is itself absolutely fascinating to me. I do know that I get quite sleepy after emotionally intense moments, like say having a heated disagreement with my wife (doesn’t happen often, but when it does…).
I’m currently listening to Avril Lavigne’s Complicated. I distinctly remember discovering her on MTV as a teenager. She was one of my first crushes, I suppose. Now I’m watching the video for I’m With You. It’s always so interesting to revisit old music because… the artist was older than me when I was a kid, but now I see them as the kid. I get this with Hayley Williams literally every year, since she’s just a little bit older than me, and all her past selves are younger than me. YouTube in general is a very trippy time machine.
Speaking of time machines, I’ve been wanting to re-examine my childhood and teenage years lately. I think it was turning 30 that flipped a switch in my head somewhere. It’s something like… throughout my 20s, my teenage years “weren’t all that long ago”, and I wanted to get as much distance from them as I could. But now that I’m done with my 20s… I do want to examine my 20s, but I also feel like I’d like to revisit and reexamine my earlier years, too. I guess that’s part of why I’m listening to old, nostalgic music while I’m writing this.
I’ve always wanted to complete this project– I’d always been looking forward to the feeling of accomplishment I believe I’ll l feel at the end of it. Although, I do think I’ve already gotten most of the value I was hoping to get out of it. I feel comfortable and confident as a writer, I’m good with words, I’m good at thinking clearly… I could stop and be pretty happy. But I’d be even happier to complete it. It’s nice to do big, bold, ambitious, audacious things. Still – I couldn’t force myself to write wordvomits when they felt repetitive. So I stopped. And I went to have fun on Twitter instead, and boy, did I have a lot of fun on Twitter. At the time I’m writing this blogpost, I have 29,500 followers on Twitter. I wish I could state that number to a few different younger versions of myself – 13, 15, 17, 21, 25 – and see each of their responses. I think the later Visas would be less surprised. I was writing on the internet since I was about 7, and was always eager to seek out community and kinship, so me becoming a minor internet microcelebrity was always basically inevitable in my mind. I’m willing to do the work, I’m willing to talk with literally a hundred thousand people, more if I can.
Ah which brings me to another reason I’m here – I’m so tired of being misunderstood on Twitter. I want to say that I know how that sounds – but wait, how does it sound? Because surely it sounds different to different people. I think most people are quite reasonable and understand the simple, mathematical-ish fact that if you have a large audience, some subset of them will be vocal and kind of nuts. But if you spend too much time onstage on Twitter, it’s easy to kind of let those vocal people take up too much space in your head. I do get a continuous stream of lovely messages and DMs from wonderful people who say they’ve appreciated and enjoyed my work – and it is my work, even if I’m operating in a sort of different domain than most people.
Reading my own words as I type them out, I find them rather tightly wound, twisted, convoluted. Which is slightly frustrating, but also somewhat exciting. I look forward to massaging the knots out of this. I have a lot to talk about regarding my experience over the past couple of decades. While I’ve been enjoying making daily youtube videos – truly, they have helped me become more verbally expressive, which is delightful to witness – I am really looking forward to getting back into long-form writing, which was honestly my first love all along. I never set out to specifically become some sort of Twitter maniac. Before Twitter I used to write Facebook status essays, and before that I used to write blogposts, and reddit comments, and Quora answers, and I’d basically just write anything everywhere. And a thing I repeatedly enjoyed about myself was how I was able to get really good at writing at some particular context, and then, importantly, abandon that context when I no longer enjoyed it.
I do think in tweets and twitter threads, as a function of having written so many of them. I have an idea for a thread about Jessie Graff – the athlete and stuntwoman – that I’ve been wanting to write, and I think it will be interesting to challenge myself to make a youtube video about it instead. I think there’s something very cool about being willing and able to walk away from something that gives you a lot of pleasure.
I’ve crossed 1,000 words, which is my standard finishing line for these word vomits. But now that I’ve done so many twitter threads and youtube videos– and having re-read some of these – I’m starting to develop a sensibility about how a piece of text becomes more useful to me if I consider future re-reads. It’s good to try for some sort of conclusion, even if you didn’t have one in mind to begin with. It’s good to end strong. If there’s one thing I want to say about everything, what is it? It’s that I had an absolutely wonderful time making friends and nerding out on Twitter, and that I think I’m now ready to rediscover what else I can do.
(I’m doing an interintellect salon on April 17 analyzing the careers of public intellectuals who were successful in their lifetimes – and there are several common elements that stand out to me. One is that they have to produce some sort of work that is highly regarded – and while lots of people like lots of my tweets, I have to write some really great blogposts and books if I want to be taken seriously beyond my current level. The other thing is to observe how they solve for distribution – but I’ll flesh that out in my Roam notes, maybe.)