(started in July 1st 2022)
I found an old note somewhere that said something like “WHEN I WRITE I HAPPY, WHEN I DONT WRITE I NO HAPPY”, and it got me laughing because it’s so simple and so true. I miss writing for myself. Lately I’ve been feeling some inner turmoil, like I don’t really know what’s going on with me, and it’s especially funny considering that the last major thing I did in my life was spend 2-3 years writing a book titled INTROSPECT. There’s a section in there about exhaustion funnels, and there I wrote something like “tbh I still struggle with this, and I haven’t figured out a solution that works for me, though I’ve done a lot of reading and research about it over the years. I think it’ll have to do with how I conceptualize my relationship with rest.
I left this wordvomit unfinished from a day or two ago and I’m coming back to it. I barely slept last night, I can’t really explain why. Then I got exhausted and I slept 3 hours on the sofa, and I’m going to shower and go to bed in a bit, it’s almost 2am. I’ve quit smoking cigarettes over the past few months, which is great. I have a doc about that called Uninstalling Copes and I’m pretty excited about using it. I’ve also been doin some light lifting with dumbbells, and I can see and feel the difference already in a matter of weeks – my wife’s noticed it too. The next big thing in my life I think is fixing my sleep. I’ve written so much about it over the years, it’s all quite fragmented. Well, there are multiple big things – I also want to upgrade my marketing consulting. I feel like before I can make a big ask for more clients, I want to update my marketing blog. I have some notes on what I want to do about that, but I don’t want to do that right now because I’m tired. A good night’s sleep and some coffee and I think I might be ready. Though of course there’s always a part of me that’s like, “well when it’s time, it’ll be time.” I think there’s some truth to that but I gotta try anyway.
What else? It’s been almost half a year since my last substack post. I want to write these gorgeous posts… how many words was that? Looks to be about 2,500 words. That’s a nice length. I’d like to write a couple of dozen 2,500 word essays. I have all these fragments – desire paths, do 100 things, solve for distribution, etc – all of these are good ideas but I don’t feel like they want to be substack essays. They’re very utilitarian ideas. Procedural. I don’t think they’re supposed to be sprawling beauties, they’re more like… fleshed out notes, vignettes, they could be screenshot essays…
I paused to think out loud about this on twitter for a bit:
I’m quite happy with “artifacts” as a concept for how to think about my writing – and I think the next step there for me is to define the different types of written artifacts that I want to make. Tweets and threads are pretty clear, and my ~7m talking head youtube videos, but… when I return to blogposts and essays – which were my bread-and-butter 10+ years ago – I find myself feeling confused and disoriented, frustrated, dissatisfied, I think because I’m trying to do many different things at many different scales, and I’m not clear about what I want. There are a bunch of “bingo card talking point essays” that I feel I “ought” to write, but I’m not really interested in doing them. I’ll probably make videos for starters – bunch of videos already exist – but it’s not what I feel like writing right now.
I think what I want to do is a kind of worldbuilding. a lot of these riffs are directives, instructions, ‘katas’… and i’m tired of talking about them. I want to demonstrate something beautiful instead, something exploratory and lush at the edge of my understanding. loosely feels like i’m torn between a training dojo aesthetic/mindset (1) and an adventurer-on-the-road aesthetic/mindset (2). theoretically it might be possible to synthesize the two – and, actually, maybe I cant even help but synthesize as I go. (1) is always with me anyway…
So I find myself in some familiar territory. I keep thinking that I will figure out my next steps by… going over my existing stuff. And, there are often clues embedded in my existing stuff. But I think I need to be more aggressive in my approach. And here I guess I’m faced with the realization that I’m afraid to be aggressive because of…
(continued on October 6th 2022)
…because of what? I left it hanging there. Oh I know. Because there was a time in my past where I was very aggressive about deleting stuff and I regret it because there’s so much lost material. I should have archived it instead. And so now I have a flinch response to deleting or generally just doing anything substantial to my stuff. And I’d like to address that.
I want to assemble something beautiful, something compelling, something I find joyful, delightful, curious, fascinating. I’ve gone back and forth about the degree to which I should care about what other people think. I mean, I always advise people not to care too much, but for a creator who cares about having an audience, you can also be too indifferent – I addressed this in my most recent substack I Don’t Wanna!
I want to be done with these wordvomits too sometime, but I don’t want to cheat it, rush it, half-fuck it… I want it to be good. My wife always asks me, “what does done mean?” and I never know how to answer, because I don’t know in advance. But I think I’m continually learning to be more graceful with my process, to put more stuff down, to pay attention to my feelings, to do more trial and error…
I’m sure it’ll all make at least a little more sense eventually, but in the meantime I think the main thing I want to do right now is touch lots of my notes and see what comes out of it. I can’t rely on fossilised inspiration, I have to find it again each time.