I’ve been feeling some disappointment and frustration lately. The thing to watch out for is when I notice that I’m starting to direct it at other people. That’s usually a sign that there’s probably some unresolved shit happening inside me that I need to address. Beautifully, one of the things that I’m frustrated about is that this 1000wordvomits project isn’t finished yet. And obviously I’m not going to finish it today, but I know from experience that writing and publishing even one new wordvomit and moving the needle on that would make me feel better.
I haven’t actually published a wordvomit this year yet, my last one was in december 2021. which means that I haven’t published one in all of Q1, and I haven’t published one since I published my book Introspect. I can guess that probably some of it is some kind of perfectionism, like I feel like I ought to… have some sort of nice grand reveal, some sort of big… something. I don’t really care though. And the important thing is always to be honest with yourself about what you care about. And what you care about is something that’s always changing to some degree. (Although, yes, the deepest core concerns tend to persist over time, whereas the surface concerns can shift day to day, or seasonally, like weather.)
I’ve attempted several wordvomits, I know this. I could go and check my drafts. Sure, let’s check my drafts real quick. Yup, I’ve attempted 5 false starts since 2022. I’ll look through them later. I also have loads of notes. Right now, I also need to take a fucking shit, lmao. Is that inappropriate to say? I don’t care. Everybody shits. I’m tired of caring. I’m tired of Twitter. I’m tired of a lot of things. I suppose again, circling back to the start, in some ways I’m really tired of myself. I’m ready to become another version of myself. I published my book, I got the tattoo, I mostly-quit smoking (I went 18 days without a cigarette, I smoked 2 yesterday when I met friends for dinner and drinks, and I quite enjoyed those cigarettes actually – particularly, I enjoyed participating in the smoker’s circle for old time’s sake – but I think that stage of my life is passing, and I’m ready to be done with it). Book, tattoo, quit-smoking. I’m doing a bunch of marketing consulting with a bunch of clients. I’m making a bunch of videos for my youtube channel. I have a bunch of books on my shelf that I want to read but I haven’t quite gotten around to them. There’s a lot I want to do. The next major thing in my life is that my wife and I want to renovate our house. That’s going to be a tedious and frustrating experience in some ways (before it becomes amazing once it’s done) – we’re going to have to figure out where we’re going to stay while it’s happening, which is extra complicated because we have cats, and we’re going to have to figure out how to pay for everything – which likely means that I’ll have to take on a bunch of additional consulting clients. Which I’m not too mad about, honestly, because I do like doing consulting work, and I’m quite blessed to have great clients that I really love working with.
Taking on too much responsibility: There’s some nuance there about the consulting that I’m not sure I’ve articulated… I love helping people, I love making a real difference, but I worry about clients that I might not really be able to help. I kind of “take on too much” responsibility. I’m the kind of guy that’s like, if I were a therapist, I would be very frustrated and disappointed and upset if my clients came to my sessions, had a good time in my session, and then didn’t learn anything from it, didn’t apply anything in their own lives. I think that captures the spirit of what’s going on for me here. I want my life and my work to be vigorous, dynamic, consequential, spry, zesty, lively, bustling, animated. I want to associate with other people who are the same. I don’t think my current experience of this is exactly the same quality as what I experienced in my 20s, but maybe in my 40s I will look back with wisdom and say that, well, in some ways it was kind of the same. A certain neediness, a certain desperation. But I think a little bit of those things can be good, actually. I’m tired of trying to be such a good boy all he time. I’m tired of making sense. I’m tired of being reasonable. Don’t you just wanna go ape shit? Yes, I do, I really do. For starters I think I’m going to write 10 wordvomits today, just to remind myself of what the fuck I am capable of. I don’t really believe in small increments, although I admit that that’s probably the best in domains like exercise. I like grandiosity. I like things to be powerful and big. Have you seen midjourney, the latest AI drawing app thingy? It’s tremendous! Probably my favorite thing that’s happened in 2022 so far. Ooh, maybe I’ll start… using midjourney prompts as cover photos for my wordvomits. Hell yes, I’ll do that. Beautiful, I love that.
A thing I’ve learned from writing my books is the importance of information architecture, and I think a result of that is that I find myself frustrated and disappointed with the infrastructure of the rest of my body of work. My primary blog has been frustrating and disappointing to me for several years now, because my twitter is such a superior configuration of my work. but now I’m starting to feel frustrated with that, feel the limits of that. And now as I write this I find myself thinking, why haven’t I finished this project yet? And part of it is that a part of me wants to re-read all of the wordvomits first before continuing. I am internally conflicted with lots of competing interests and that’s been grinding me to a stop. Well, I’m going to take a day to sit down and untangle this.