I’ve been spending most of my time on Twitter lately. And it’s probably not great for me. It’s time for me to reorient. I’ve also been making YouTube videos fairly regularly, which is great, and I just started posting on my TikTok as well, which is fun and exciting. In other news I also finally got myself a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad, which has been fun to fool around with. But the biggest thing weighing on me – and that metaphor is significant – has been the ebook, INTROSPECT, that I’ve been working on for something like 2 years now.
When I was getting into the shower earlier, I found myself thinking the thought, “man, my book is killing me”. And it was such a casual, passing thought, but I caught it, and it troubled me. Because I’ve also been thinking about the power of words. If I casually joke that my book is killing me, then that’s something that I believe will manifest in some way. And it certainly manifests as muscular tension, and what feels like “cortisol bombs” in my body – burning eyes, shallow breathing, and this general undercurrent of alarm and anxiety that has become quite familiar to me now.
So I want to take a wordvomit to think out loud about this, and hopefully arrive to a better understanding that’s open and generative, rather than closed and tight. I think part of the issue here is that I’ve been spending so much time tweeting, with the assumption that every tweet is going to be seen by an audience, that it has kind of crowded out more deliberate, drawn out forms of thinking. Which is what I set this blog up for in the first place, all the way back in 2012, so here I am!
Ok so first of all, “my book is killing me” can be framed as a kind of truthful statement – I will be a different person when I publish the book, so in a sense the book is killing a particular version of me, or a particular type of me. It’s helping me grow out of my current skin, to shake that off and become a bigger, stronger, better version of myself. So that’s great, and that’s something I will carry with me.
But also I know in my heart that that’s not exactly what I meant when I said that to myself. I meant it as a complaint, a frustration, a sense of anger, anguish, despair. The truth I’ve been avoiding is that I haven’t been enjoying working on my book. I spend a lot of time ignoring it, putting it off. And when I think about it, that’s fine too, because its mere existence has been helpful to me. It’s a frame that’s been helpful to me while I look out at the world. And if I want to, I can choose not to publish it at all. I can say, apologies, I mis-scoped the project, I’ll publish it maybe decades from now. I can do that. Not that many people have preordered the book, and I haven’t taken their money. I could then move on to other projects that I’ve been meaning to work on. It’ll be fine. Maybe a handful of haters will mock me for it but I don’t have to care what they think. Most of my friends and supporters will be supportive, though maybe they might revise their assessment of my utterances a little bit. Which would be fine, because I can earn back whatever is lost just by being effective at whatever I do next. Let’s sit with that thought. INTROSPECT is postponed/cancelled indefinitely, so Visa can work on other things. How does that feel?
Fuck that. I’m finishing this book. I’m seeing this through to the end. I just had to say out loud that it’s been a pain in the ass. There’s a bit in a Miyazaki documentary that really captures my feelings on this. He says:
“What a hassle. It’s the ultimate hassle, I’m telling you. But if you said, ‘Why don’t you quit?’ I’d just say, “Shut Up.” Most important things in life are a hassle. If life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.”
So, yeah this feels correct. This is where I’m at. My book is hassling me. It’s the ultimate hassle. But I refuse to quit. What’s bothering me, though, is that I have not been doing battle with it every day, with courage and nerve and conviction. I know that every time I step into the document I’m going to be beaten to some degree. I’m going to endure pain. I’m going to be reminded of my imperfections, my incompetence, my inadequacies. I will be made intimately acquainted with the limits of my abilities and this is extremely uncomfortable, extremely unpleasant. But the thing is, once I consciously think about it, I’m like, fuck it, let’s go. It’s fight. It’s only when I’m not consciously thinking about it that I avoid it. Because it’s unpleasant!
So what this suggests to me is that I need a ritual, a routine, something that preps me psychologically for the agonising ice-cold shower of creative work. I know that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, I have no doubt about that. I’m already 794,000 words into this project, I have no interest in backing out. I’m going to make it to 1,000,000. And then I’ll fucking do it again. Because I am a relentless prolific motherfucker, that’s who I am. It might be my aversion to routines and ritual and ceremony that’s holding me back here. And I’ve surely already tweeted about this, I’ve surely already written multiple word vomits about this. But at this stage in my journey I don’t care. I’ll do it again. I’ll fucking do it again. I’ll finish the book and then I’ll write another one. And another one after. And it’ll all be a goddamn hassle and I will love it. I know this, as a deeper truth. This is beyond coercion and non-coercion. This is about the searing white light bursting out from the center of my chest, the crackling electricity agitating my fingertips. Let’s. Fucking. Go.