it’s been about 7 weeks since my son was born. i’ve been doing a bunch of threads about my experience of fatherhood on twitter, but I don’t really want to spend more time talking about that right now.
I sat at my computer and got tired. i feel a flinch at the idea of saying “i’m tired”. i think that statement is very loaded and people interpret all sorts of things when they see it. i’m wary of being misunderstood. Maybe a little too wary. it took me a while to write these sentences, and i feel marginally less tired after writing them. sometimes if you contradict yourself back and forth you create an elegant bit of nuance. if i do nothing else i would like to create some elegant bits of nuance. But I do want to do more than that, if i’m being honest. I want to write things that move people, that are compelling and useful.
A part of me would like to take my time with these wordvomits. Another part of me would like to be done with them already. Right now, I would like to at least write and publish one, which is what I’m working towards. I think I probably would have articulated, on multiple occasions, what this project is about, what I want to get out of it. A lot of it initially was simply about becoming a better writer, which I think I have achieved, but there’s of course always more to get better at. I’ve begun to question, what else? What makes a wordvomit worth writing, worth publishing? It’s good if it’s a snapshot of my thoughts and feelings at some particular point in time, but that’s true of basically anything I write. What else? I would like to feel my feelings in a way that’s evocative, such that when I revisit a piece, I can revisit those feelings, and feel a sense of fluency about them.
I think that’s correct. I think a lot of my goal with stream-of-consciousness writing is not just to blurt out whatever is happening, but to arrive at something. I don’t necessarily know what that something is when I start writing, but I do believe that there’s almost always something, particularly if I sit down with a feeling that I ought to be writing. I remember there were instances in the past where I started to get frustrated with the wordvomits, because it felt forced, like I had nothing to say. Perhaps in those times I should’ve done something other than writing.
I want to spend some time optimizing for throughput. I’ve been spending years, it feels like, just thinking. And I would guess that it’s probably been more productive than it looks, or than it feels, it’s just that I don’t have anything to show for it. And the way to have something to show for it is to do something. And in my case that means writing. But write what?
I recently did a tweet about a pigeon at my windowsill that I was rather delighted by. I think it demonstrated something that I’ve been trying to think and talk about, which is that what i feel the world needs is fresh ways of seeing. Not necessarily novel or original, those are kinda impossible tasks in the sense that there’s always someone who has done it before, or something similar to it before. // I paused here for a moment because I recognize a good tweet when I write one, and I tweeted about it. I then next tweeted about why Twitter is still fun (because it still contains freshness), and then quoted an old tweet about how Pinterest is fresh too. Which I don’t think is necessarily where I saw it going, but I enjoyed it. I think that’s probably what I want. I want to enjoy myself, I want to demonstrate what it looks like to enjoy myself. I want to surprise myself. It’s hard to be surprised with a lot of planning and structure and so on.
The question on my mind now I suppose is, how do I continue to surprise myself? What’s stopping me? Do I need permission? I started a threadapalooza thread today and noticed that right away i began by talking about a sense of obligation. Which is wearisome. I have no shortage of obligations. Maybe my truest obligation to myself is to give myself the space, freedom, permission, to just freestyle. I would like to freestyle more. What if I pretended I didn’t have any todo list items, didn’t have any preconceptions, no goals, and just set aside some time tomorrow (since I’m about to go to bed now) to write something exploratory? To describe something? Maybe I could describe my home.
I have been living slightly in the past every day these past few years now, trying to keep track of old impulses, old commitments. but if I haven’t made progress on them in a while, it’s unlikely that straining harder is going to help. It’s time for a big renegotiation, a big reconsolidation. What if I just freestyled? I know I’m capable. I’ve done it many times in the past, some of my best material is rather freestyle-y. I want to feel my feelings. It would be a gift to myself. And a gift to others too, honestly, for anyone to witness anybody really inhabiting that state of being.
What to close with? I do feel like once I can relax a little bit about it, it seems likely that I will go back and reread old wordvomits and see what I can follow up on. But I’m leaning towards a… let’s try spending a few months not making any new plans. Let’s freestyle and see what old plans come to fruition that way. Let’s trust ourselves for a change. I’m thinking now of an essay(?) someone once wrote titled “make yourself comfortable”… updated my blog with it accordingly. Alright, that was a pretty nice use of an hour or so. I feel good about going to bed now. Let’s do more of this.