i feel like i’m due for some reinvention, some rework, some sort of shakeup
one dimension in which this is obviously necessary is my daily routine. i was rarely one to design routines to begin with, but having a baby boy (just crossed 100days/14weeks) has completely disrupted whatever my habits and routines were before
i can’t stop thinking about how I used to write feverishly on my commutes when I had a job. I think I wrote the largest bulk of these wordvomits in 2015, before my twitter started getting more engagement
sidenote: i’m really proud of the fact that i have been lifting a 12kg kettlebell consistently for a month now. i was feeling weak and lethargic and tired in the preceeding months, but i couldn’t quite find a configuration of working out that made sense to me, that felt right, until i brought my kettlebell into the shower. it’s been a month, so it’s still a little early, but the part i’m really excited about is the fact that i now additionally feel compelled to do pushups and soon do some barbell work, particularly squats again.
so what now? i want to start writing again the way i started lifting. particularly from 2018–2022, I spent a lot of time tweeting, tweeting, tweeting. i wrote i think over 200,000 tweets in that time. built an audience which now is at 78,000+ followers, and seems to be continually growing without any special effort on my part. i also wrote a couple of books, the second one being quite an all-consuming challenge.
trying to cut back on tweeting, i dont think is a particularly useful enterprise. i’ve come to believe that the way forward in anything is to focus on what you want to see more of. and i want to see more essays coming out of me. so that’s what i want to think about, independent of tweeting. i want to write more essays. how do i do that? well, i think even before i try to write pretty, beautiful, intricate essays, i should do sketches and studies. and i want them to be comparatively “low pressure”. I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself the past year or two and it hasn’t been particularly fruitful. maybe it’s possible that i will see some returns on that past behavior in unexpected ways, but there isn’t much point worrying about it. rather, what I think I want to do at this point is to scroll through my notes, looking for anything that feels like i haven’t explored in text, and then just dive into that and ramble on. and it doesn’t really matter so much if i don’t use these sketches as drafts for later essays. really what I need is the practice, the output.
i was writing recently in logjam about how a part of me has grown afraid of writing more, because i don’t know what i’m going to do with it. well i’m going to hit pause on worrying about what i’m going to do with it. it’s fine if i don’t do anything with it. i’m reminded of some stuff i’ve learned about pain in the body, like how… you might hurt a finger or a toe, and then flinch to protect it, and that flinching might cause more pain in the form of muscle spasms or what have you. and the way out of that is to massage the muscles, or even “smash” them, as my buddy @movebettersam describes it.
yeah this metaphor feels rich. i have some tight muscles in this space, some emotional knottedness. and i know that as with muscle knots, simply going harder doesn’t necessarily help, and even simply resting doesn’t necessarily help. you have to get into the knots. part of it is light activity, which i think a wordvomit/sketch approach is good for. for a while i stopped writing wordvomits because i didn’t really see the point of them, or didn’t feel like it, i can’t quite remember. but now this feels rich and relevant again. if i wrote one a day, i would be almost done by my 35th birthday, and be finished soon afterwards. that would be nice. it would be even cooler if i were finished before the birthday, but i know from experience that that’s quite unlikely.
so here we are. it’s almost like a fresh start of sorts. ~850,000 words done, 150,000 words to go. what do i have to say with all of these words? there’s a thing i think i want to write about being singaporean. starting on that now with 200 words to go feels premature. and it also feels like it shouldn’t be an “A + B” wordvomit like i’ve sometimes done, when it feels like a continuous topic. no, here i gotta go a bit harder on the idea of reinvention, recreation, switching things up. when do i want to do this writing? the smartest times feel like “first thing in the morning” or “last thing at night”, maybe both. currently i started writing this while my wife was in the shower. my son is asleep in his cot. i’m getting tired and sleepy, so i don’t know if it’s wise to try and write the second thing after this. but i am currently still open to the idea of doing an attempt. it’ll probably fail but so what? it’s worth a shot.
what else is there to be said about routines? how have i failed in the past? i remember at some point being extremely proud that i had written hundreds of thousands of words in this project, it was basically my proudest accomplishment at the time. and i know that i will be proud to finally finish it when i do finish it, as proof to myself and for anyone who cares that yes, i am capable of starting and following through and finishing things that matter to me, even if it takes a little longer than I had hoped or expected.
some quick closing thoughts on my substack? i acknowledged in it that i’m not going to be able to do the big proper essays that i’ve been fantasizing about for so long. i feel like i should sort of reorient to thinking of myself as a sort of oldtimey magazine columnist. that’s something i always wanted to do as a teenager. now i have the actual opportunity to do it, so why not do it? maybe think out loud for a bit about what a magazine column would look like?
I know that one of my frustrations is that i don’t want to get pigeonholed into being a person with a very specific beat. this is bad marketing advice. i typically advise my clients to figure out what their niche is and to double down on that. well, i did sorta do that in a way on twitter, i’m mr. friendly ambitious nerd, and i think my big niche interest is historical scenes, maybe? well if that’s true then why haven’t i been doing the reading? i’ve been meaning to summarize mcluhan’s understanding media, and gilette-and-moores’ king warrior magician lover, and write something about murakami’s book about being a novelist. each of those could maybe potentially be a standalone substack post. but i suppose there’s another part of me that… doesn’t really want to do that? see, it’s these little vaguenesses that really stymie me. what do i want to do, what do i not want to do? it seems like it should probably be pretty straightforward, but it’s really not, and i haven’t spent nearly enough time just feeling my way through all of this. and this is something that i think i will benefit greatly from spending more time doing.
so let’s do that. let’s feel for the vaguenesses. what do i want to do? i want to do several different things simultaneously. for instance, one of the things i want to do is to write my memoirs. a part of me wants to devote say, 3-5 substack essays to my memoirs. the singaporeanness one feels like it might be worth doing. but this then comes into conflict with another part of me that says, nooo, you can’t just… write your memoirs for 5 essays in a row, that’s too much about you. it might bore some people, but that’s not the real issue is it? you might bore yourself!! you might feel like you’re a one-note player for that length of time.
but wait a minute. there’s some missing nuance here i wasn’t thinking about before i wrote this. which is that, my original plan was something like, well, i’m going to infuse some of myself in any essay i write. over time i will end up sharing some personal details, some personal history, etc across other essays about other things, so my longtime readers will end up getting to know me better, even if i don’t actually title any essays “about me, my life story,” etc. but the flipside is also true!! i can’t possibly write a series of essays about me, without simultaneously bringing up all sorts of tangential details, particularly about culture, and thinking, and all these other things i care about. i feel kinda silly now, and also relieved. alright. so now i feel my resistance to the idea of writing 3-5 essays “about myself” to be decreasing, i’m flinching less. i’m ok with it if they can also be about other things. and i can figure out oblique titles and frames or whatever, in the final form it can be quite different from what it started out as. i’m reminded of sly stallone talking about how, from some angles, rocky is a love story where the guy happens to be a boxer. that sort of thing. the tagline of my substack is “all the channels at once”, and I really want to convey that. but ironically, trying too hard to do that is forceful. we’re back to the john mayer riff about “the universe in a glass of water” again. jeeeez ok. lmao. that’s good.
what else? i’m in a puzzle-solving mood, baby, what else can we figure out? oh, the book reviews, yes. why haven’t i written book reviews? it’s probably because I haven’t articulated to myself precisely what a book review is supposed to look and feel like on my substack. am i trying to persuade people to buy the books? no. am I trying to summarize the books? a little bit, but i’m not in the business of shilling summaries exactly. I do want to have bullet point note summaries of my books, which i think is something best done on visakanv.com/blog/archives for reference. but that’s not what i would want to send people over substack, though i technically could. but no i want to do something more evocative than that. (even though, to me personally, a well-selected collection of bullet notes is plenty evocative. but I want to paint!!)
I want to paint. a lot of my writing on twitter has felt like semi-technical sketching, a lot of blueprints and diagrams and such. i’m grateful to my past self for getting good at it, and i trust that it will be a skill that serves me well for the rest of my life. but i also feel this itch to be more evocative. i read a few pages of The Overstory and i felt it. from somewhere else I remember the phrase “the night was a garden of eyes”– octavio paz. that’s the sort of writing i want to do more of. i’m not super sure if i can bruteforce that. i think it’s possible, i just need to begin with that sense in mind. i felt very inspired watching jacqueline novak’s standup special, and i might watch that again. i’m definitely getting a sense of, for me to produce the work i want to produce, i have to immerse myself in what i find beautiful.