It’s occurred to me a few times recently that… by stepping into the Friendly Ambitious Nerd King persona, I’ve made it difficult for myself to express things like anger, frustration, resentment, rage, annoyance, etc. I made it an aspirational goal for myself to “be a good king”. And I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that. But I also think I need to do something to basically shit out all the pent up emotions that have slowly accumulated every time I’ve held my tongue. And this is probably the place to do it! I haven’t posted here in a while, and a part of me is angry and resentful that this project isn’t done already.
Why isn’t it done already? Why haven’t I been writing wordvomits every day in the past 200 days and gotten this out of my system? Well I was busy with writing a book at some point. And I’ve been tweeting a lot. And I’ve been thinking very hard about the substacks. Okay, but why didn’t I write wordvomits as rehearsals for the substacks? Uh, you got me on that one, I’m not sure. There was a period of time where I got tired of writing wordvomits because it felt like I just kept repeating myself. Real quick let’s check, when was that? It feels like… before I was writing Introspect? Maybe earlier? Before I wrote FAN? Before I left my job? Looks like I attempt to write a wordvomit at least every month, but… scanning, I didn’t really feel like I had a dense burst since… 2019? It just started feeling repetitive and I wasn’t enjoying that. But alright, here I am now, back again, and I feel like I’ve accumulated enough psychic clutter that it’s time for some fucking discharge. I’m feeling belligerent and grumpy and dissatisfied, because I haven’t had the big, good wins that I’ve been craving. Yeah, Introspect was good. We Were Voyagers and Are You Serious were good. That’s it. I want more. I want a dozen excellent essays. I know that I have the ingredients within me. Yet I spend so much time sitting around being lethargic. Which I know is fucking emotional knottedness, lmao. And I tried to write substack posts about it but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Maybe at some level it felt fraudulent. Maybe I just need to literally vomit all of this stuff up before I feel well enough to write. It’s strange to think about it like this but here we are. Puking it all out. Great. Let it go.
Now what? I’m writing a substack post about the junkyard thing. Junkyard of intentions. What’s the big picture summary? Well, I have a lot of fucking junk. It’s pissing me off. My first instinct is to wish there were less of it. But that’s not the actual problem. The actual problem is that it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t feel at home in it. I feel oppressed by it. I’m out of sync with it. I crave resonance. I want it to make sense. I took a minute to archive a bunch of my instagram post, which felt good. But the important thing there wasn’t the archiving. The important thing was getting clarity about the various ongoing projects that I have. The patterns in the observations that I make. To understand is to perceive patterns. I like observing my cats to see what they’re thinking. I like observing children, and strangers in solitude. I like noticing configurations that I find revealing, like a person’s workspace, a driver’s tech. something strange about infrastructure, or design of public things.
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took a break there. Spent some time looking through my pinterest. Making sense of the boards. It mostly feels pretty good but there’s some overlap
I’ve been obsessed for a long time with the idea of frames. Looking out of a window, into another world. Looking into a phone screen, into another world. Every frame implies another world, a new way of seeing, boundaries. How people are moving. What they’re looking at. The world they’re inhabiting.
Now I’m looking at my pinterest boards. I have 2441 pins across 61 boards. I’m happy with most of them, but some of the boards are kinda “overlappy”. Which isn’t too bad. I have a 7yo board called Nostalgia… another called books, another called inspiration… so those were some old boards where I was trying to use pinterest as a sort of log. I’m not sure that’s the best possible use of it, or how I want to use it.
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I wanted to get back to the resentment stuff, blurt it out, face it. i’m mad that i’m not more successful already. i’m embarrassed to say that, but it’s true, and hopefully once i’ve expressed it it doesn’t… linger. do i have to post this here? I could just delete it and nobody needs to know. but it’s the truth and i promised my childself the truth. so yeah, okay. when i examine it more closely and ask myself more questions, well why aren’t i more successful already? I’m not going to blame other people for not recognizing my worth. I’m the one responsible to communicate what i’m about. my books aren’t as good as they could be. i haven’t written the essays i could write. i am the one responsible for taking me to the next level.
so why am i sitting around being mad rather than doing something about it? i suppose the animal body, child heart version of myself, wants to be… soothed, appreciated, treated, celebrated. i don’t think of myself as someone who’s obsessed with work, but that almost makes it trickier because i insulate myself from noticing when i’m doing it. the truth is I do have something of a workaholic in me, he just doesn’t identify as such. and i would note that he’s not even productive. he just agonizes all the time. it’s very inefficient.
that’s 1000, I’ll start over again tomorrow about resentments in more detail. tbc
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(I started but I didn’t finish, so here’s a dump of what I had):
It’s been 13 days since the last wordvomit I published, and I thought I might write about something different – but I came to this thinking the exact same thing I thought yesterday – that the FAN persona that I’ve invented and stepped into, while in many ways incredibly fruitful, has also created a shadow that’s full of murky, grumpy frustrations, complaints, annoyances that I feel like I ought to deal with somehow. I could deal with it in private. I certainly don’t feel like dealing with it in public. But these wordvomits are sort of a liminal in-between space, and for that I am grateful. Because I do feel like an older commitment that I had was to process my feelings in public. It’s a tricky commitment, one that has had to evolve over the years. It’s not as simple as I thought it might be. Nothing serious ever really is.
I’m really grumpy about people who don’t seem to know how to read. I say seem, because sometimes maybe it’s not that people are unable, but merely(?) unwilling. Does it matter which is which? For me to do my best work I have to focus on the people who are willing and able to read. Yet something upsets me about people who don’t. I found myself saying somewhere – maybe it was on bluesky – that it feels like a ‘retroactive alienation’. I’m so mad at people who are belligerent and dismissive. I’m mad for them, I’m mad that the way they conduct themselves makes it harder for them to find peace. Why am I mad for them? Why am I making their problem, my problem? Can I simply let it go without psychoanalyzing it? I stop to breathe for a few seconds. I’m still curious. Why am I making their problem, my problem? Could it be that I’ve internalized at some level that my role requires that I help people with their problems?
I’m not entirely sure. But let’s try redefining it. My role does not require that I help everyone with their problems. That’s not possible. It’s not up to me to fix everyone’s problems.
(Twitter sidenote). My books are pretty good and have helped lots of people and i remain dissatisfied with them. Some people hear me say this and say things like “don’t be so hard on yourself” but I mean it in a very neutral way, they’re like 6-7/10 and i can imagine what 8-9/10 would look like.
I have a lot of drafts and notes everywhere. A part of me always wishes they were better-wrangled, more orderly, sensible. I could, at any point in time, make things a little better by spending a bit of time making them better. Lets do this for 25 minutes.