Two possible trains, one about forgetting, another about defining problems. I’ve already forgotten the forgetting train. So let’s go with defining problems.
What is the big problem in my life right now? My instinctive answer is, too many things going on, too scattered, too chaotic. What would I say to a client who comes to me with that? I’d smile and laugh and say, of course. (Simply thinking “what would I say to a client” is really evocative and an example of good thinking that’s grounded in feeling. It gets me out of my fuzzy state and into something clearer.) I have had clients say that to me. As well as random kids in my DMs. And I’ve had people say I was helpful. And the question is, was I really helpful? Well now I get to test with myself.
My belief is that the problem of “too many things going on” is misframed. It’s a symptom, not the disease. You can try to address the symptom by reducing the number of things going on, and that’s not a bad idea. Some amount of symptom relief can help free up capacity to work on the actual problem. But if you mistake the symptom for the problem, you’ll be fighting the symptoms forever. I believe there has to be a better way. The real problem re: “too much things going on” I think is often something closer to like, lack of clarity about purpose. I’m in a state where I don’t really know what I want.
What do I want? I’m thinking of the Lao Tzu quote I opened Introspect’s Act 3 with – at the center of your being, you know who you are and you know what you want. Which, I am now looking up, and discovering that it’s a misattribution. Oops. The actual provenance is messy. But I think there’s a sound, useful idea here.
I believe it’s possible that I could introspect – sit, meditate, breathe, feel, think, and in so doing, untangle some emotional knots and feel clarity about what I really want, and what my perceived problems are, and what my actual problems are. I could talk about the book I wrote about it, but really what would be better if I just did it, demonstrated it to myself again.
I believe that the best use of my time right now is still to produce media. I have gotten into some elaborate twists and turns about what kind of media exactly…
oh, one thing I remember is. having good names and taglines for my alts was something I found invigorating, but then over time it starts to get familiar, and then dull. maybe it’s time to change my bio… alright, took me quite a bit of time thinking about it, and I’m not ~ecstatic~ about the answers, but I’m quite happy with “make yourself comfortable” for my priv alt and “there’s always a move” for my theatric alt. Those are both good mantras. And I think they’re also both relevant to my current circumstances. I want to make myself comfortable, and look for good moves. How can I make myself comfortable?
I reduced my total iOS notes from over 1000 to under 900. But do I feel better? Not particularly, right? Why is that? Because the number is a proxy for something else. Theoretically I think it’s possible that I might reduce it to 500 with great effort and still feel frustrated. Alternatively, I could imagine it ballooning to 2000, maybe 3000, and still feeling good about it… if there’s a good underlying architecture to it. That’s the thing I’m looking for. I’m looking for good architecture. What would good architecture look like? We gotta look at the folders… I’ll create a scapple graph with the folders…
^ I went to bed after the following. I’m going to head out to do some errands soon but I’d like to finish up this wordvomit before I go. What was I trying to say with all of this? I’m looking for the right posture, the right frame, the right architecture, the right angles. I believe that when you get there, everything else becomes comparatively effortless, because the resistance withers away, or maybe it might be more accurate to say that the resistance is integrated into the work.
So my question to myself is, what is the resistance I am feeling right now? I’m wary of not being useful. Someone sent me a link recently to a bunch of stuff they wrote about their personal breakthrough, and I appreciate that they sent it to me, and I appreciated reading it, but if I’m being honest, I also thought it was kinda… “not really the real thing”. I don’t mean to be harsh in my criticism, but sometimes even the gentlest criticism is kinda brutal. I never intend to discourage or dishearten anyone. In this particular case I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know the person well enough to know how they would handle it. It takes a lot of shared understanding and a sense of care to deliver criticisms that go hard at things that are important to people.
well, so what is my criticism of myself? I trust that I care about me, right? Yes. Alright so Visa is… the first phrase that comes to my mind is “lollygagging about”, lol. That feels like an erroneous criticism masked in silliness. It’s a silly way of saying lazy, idle, bum. I don’t think that is the problem. What is the actual problem, that that thing is a cover for? Another thing comes up that’s like, “unstructured”, “unsystematic”. Like, if I believe writing is the most important thing I could be doing, then I would be writing, right? Am I writing? Sort of? I’m missing some precision here, which is a good sign because I must be in some vague territory. This is what I try to help my clients with. I would be ecstatic if I could help myself. And I believe its possible.
What am I getting at with unstructured, unsystematic? Lets set that aside for a bit. One thing I believe I know, that I feel in my heart, in my body, is that I feel great when I’ve been writing. And a thing I feel sorry for myself about is that I haven’t enjoyed the feeling of writing in a while. I’m feeling some of it now. When words just pour out of my fingers and I’m a witness to the process, rather than actively meddling with each phrase. I feel a sense of, “man, if I could just do this every day, all my problems will be solved.” Of course, that’s probably not technically, precisely true, but there is a sense in which it FEELS true. So… what’s stopping me? Funnily- I wrote a wordvomit yesterday and published it, and I’m writing a second one now and I’m confident that I’m going to publish this one too – this one is at now over 1100 words so I think I’m going for the 2x wordvomit.
And here’s the funny part: I’m not writing it in my notes, I’m not writing it in my blog, I’m writing it in goddam wordcounter.net. Because right now, where I’m at in my life, there’s something simple and satisfying about seeing the wordcount go up. Is a writer’s job simply to maximize wordcount? Obviously not. But I have been knotted and twisted for what feels like months now, trying to make word jewelry, and I don’t seem to have the right tools, the right environment, the right materials, and so all I have is a pile of sludge. I remember something Dorothy Parker wrote in a despondent letter – “all I have is a pile of paper covered with wrong words”. I relate to that feeling– I’ve experienced it before. But also when she continues on to describe herself as incompetent I find myself feeling so much love, and a bit of anger on her behalf, at the part of herself that is dismissing and diminishing her like that.
At some point in my life this wordvomit project was one of the main things that I obsessed with. It was a beacon in the darkness for me, something that kept me going. I want to say “Once I left my job and I started posting more on twitter etc, it became less of a priority” – but I don’t know if that’s the whole truth. I think if you read some of the earlier ones you’ll see a different story – something like, I just got increasingly BORED, when I started to feel like I was saying the same things over and over again. Mind you now that I look back I can also see and say that it was worthwhile practice – the repetition was useful, I became more familiar with myself and my stuff, I developed confidence in my understandings. But the truth is that I got bored and wanted to do other things. And so I left to do other things. This is something I’ve been thinking more about lately, like how there are cycles in everything. Take the most delicious food in the world, whatever your favorite thing is – there’s still only so much of it you can eat before you start to feel full, to the point of feeling sick. When you get the message hang up the phone. When you get bored of something that’s typically a sign to move on and do something else. The issue with so much of the world seems to be that people don’t pay attention to their own feelings, and/or they don’t respect their own feelings, and so they feel like they have to discipline and force and coerce themselves to do all sorts of things that they don’t actually want to do, don’t actually feel like doing. You can see this again if you go back to ~2015 in my own archives on this very blog, how much time and energy I spent trying to force myself, to practice authoritarian surveillance over myself – I made some progress sure but it also stripped me of the joy of living and I fell into a pretty deep depression. The precise causality is a bit more complicated than that but that’s not what I really want to get into right now.
Right now mostly I don’t even have a super specific thing that I want to get to, I’m just enjoying the fact that these words keep coming and they don’t stop coming. It’s kind of funny to say it out loud, and to feel the truth of it. I’m reminded of George Orwell’s essay Why I Write. Like yeah, there’s political purpose and whatnot, but you can also straight up just enjoy words, enjoy writing. God I’ve missed this so much. Even if I’m writing entirely for myself, there is something satisfying that happens, the same way that it’s satisfying to go for a walk in the sunlight with no destination in mind. Maybe my issue is that I’ve been overfixated on outcomes. Overfixated on specific things that I want to write. That seems true, but if I’m honest it still doesn’t feel like the actual problem. I’m reminded now of my 1-1s with my exboss where every week or every other week we would discuss how things are going. We had a high-trust relationship so I would be very open and honest in my introspection, it was basically therapy for me where I would try to figure out how to perform better, and he would help me. And I do think it’s fair to say that my performance improved substantially as a whole over those years. But looking back I’m not sure I was entirely honest with myself all the time. There were things that I couldn’t quite see from where I was standing. And that’s kind of inevitable because of the nature of blindspots and so on. And the question, again, is what am I not seeing, about who I am right now?
I’ve done a bunch of thinking and writing but I still don’t have a satisfying answer. But what I have is the resurgence os a satisfying process. Which feels great. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem today, it’s incredible symptom relief. I feel so much better. And I’m going to continue to work through the question. Maybe there is no ultimate answer, maybe it’s all process. But I don’t think that’s entirely true or correct either. I think there are certain thresholds you can cross, certain reframings you can do, that make a really big, dramatic, lasting difference, at least at the scale of several months. Yeah. I do believe it’s possible to arrive at something that might be condensed into maybe even a short sentence, that sets me off on months of writing. And I’d like that. I’d be happy with that. I think. We’ll see.