It occurred to me that I haven’t felt truly relaxed in what feels like a really long time. I felt a bit of it while I took a day off in the middle of my last trip to SF, and that was wonderful – it’s a great reminder that contented bliss is possible – but the real challenge is to bring some of that bliss back into everyday life.
And I find myself thinking, well, have I been writing? Ray Bradbury had a quote (I paraphrase) about how writers who don’t write start to feel like shit, and I have a note for myself somewhere in my google keep that says “when I publish, I happy, when I don’t publish, I no happy”, and that’s really a critical truth about who I am, how I am. Years of experience have taught me that if I want to tinker with this dynamic, I should be tinkering with it after having published, ie from a place of abundance rather than scarcity.
I want to ask myself, what would relaxation look like, feel like? Part of it would be publishing regularly. Why haven’t I been publishing regularly? Well we have to dig into what “publishing regularly” even means. I do tweet basically every day, which could maybe described as a kind of publishing. But I seldom find that deeply satisfying. It does happen from time to time when I write a good thread that “clicks” something for me – this happened most recently when I made a minor re-realization about my relationship with containers.
How am I feeling right now? I need to pee. Alright done. How about now? I’m feeling quite cosy, actually! I’m on my sofa with my cat and my laptop. I don’t usually unplug my laptop from my monitors, but I did this time because I wanted to get on a call, and I wanted to do the call on my laptop. I’m listening to Inordinary by Hayley Williams on a pair of headphones I bought fairly recently. I’m grateful to my past self for buying those headphones. I’m grateful to my friends for buying me my laptop. I forget to be grateful sometimes. What else is going on? I have a bunch of tabs open. I could close them. But that might distract me from this wordvomit. Lets do a quick scan through all of them. Alright I closed a few. I’m noting that I did a search on this blog for “make comfortable” to see what come up, and it was interesting to see that there are quite a few posts. I have more thoughts on 1000wordvomits as a project…
I started this project in 2012. It went through a few different phases. Sometimes I went hard, writing and publishing everyday, sometimes multiple wordvomits in the same day. And sometimes I went months without publishing anything. I’m okay with this. It’s an interesting window into my publishing cadences. A part of me wishes I had kept a stable publishing schedule, but there are surely reasons for why I didn’t, and maybe I might like to examine why that is, if I really wanted to change that. But in this moment, I’m not too concerned about that. I’m more concerned with “getting to the end” of this. We’re halfway through. But I also know that I don’t just like churning out wordvomits purely for the sake of it. There’s an implicit thought or belief here, which is that in the process of going through this one, some interesting thoughts will emerge, and I will feel less blocked.
I had a good conversation with a friend (Ms G) earlier about creativity and culture, thinking about the essays I want to write. I’ve spent most of this year thinking about the essays I want to write, ideating them, imagining them, drafting them, reworking them, and generally being unsatisfied with them. And that’s all a part of my process. In 2023 I’d like to be publishing substack essays roughly once a week.
I have several mediums or channels that I operate in. My twitter is for thinking out loud, tentative and uncertain thoughts. It’s often fun and feels like “activity”, which is good, but it doesn’t always cross a threshold of satisfying. Publishing a wordvomit is more satisfying than spending all day on twitter. And publishing a substack essay is more satisfying than publishing a wordvomit, but it has a higher barrier to publishing. All of this is in my head, of course, but they are meaningful distinctions to me. Youtube videos are for freestyling and vibing out on thoughts I want to articulate. I’m now returning to thinking about wordvomits in a similar way. Figuring out the difference between youtube prompts and wordvomit prompts has been somewhat challenging. The good thing about video is that I can convey more via body language and tone of voice, the bad thing about video is that I can’t as easily revisit and re-reference what I said earlier in the video – it requires more of an act of memory. In writing, I can just scroll up and reread. In practice, I don’t do a lot of rereading. I just rewrite again.
I haven’t felt comfortable in a long time, with regards to my writing, publishing, creativity. It felt really satisfying to publish my second book Introspect. And i rode that high maybe for a week, maybe residually for about a month. And since then I’ve been feeling somewhat lost and disoriented, and I’ve been slow to admit that truth to myself, in part maybe because it comes across as weak. But denying the truth makes it harder to do anything about it. I can see more clearly now that I have a bunch of conflicting interests, re: what I want to write. When I’m vague about it, it’s hard for me to make precise, thoughtful decisions. Wordvomits are an excellent place for me to figure out precise nuances. Better than Twitter, where I now have more of an audience. I do still like to think out loud on Twitter, but there are things about Twitter as a medium that make certain thoughts harder to think. Longer thoughts, particularly. Trailing, freeform thoughts. Twitter is a containerized-thought medium. I do think I’ll probably write a substack essay at some point about all of my thoughts on Twitter. I have a bunch of different goals for that essay, and a bunch of different things I’d like to include – something of a history of my own twitter experience, what I like about the platform, the dreams and wishes I’ve had for it, and how I’m thinking about it moving forward (context here is the cultural shift that’s been happening since Elon took over). I hope Twitter survives, because it’s been my favorite place on the internet for a few years now. But ultimately it’s the Internet that I really love, not any particular place on it. And in a narrow sense, the specific Twitter that I loved is no more – this is always the case with everything, everything is always being reborn, dying and remade anew simultaneously.
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So what now? Idk if I’m in the mood to write a second wordvomit after this one, so maybe I’ll just keep going. I don’t know if I want this to be a double, but let’s keep going. I know that I have a list of essay ideas in my notes, and a bunch of them are essays I’d like to already have written, but don’t quite feel like they belong on my substack. Well, the smart move there that only recently became clear to me is that I ought to write them as wordvomits.
There was a while ago where I stopped writing wordvomits in part because they had started to seem so repetitive, like I was just describing my situation over and over again and I was getting bored of myself. Well, then what happened was that I stepped away from it, spent a bunch of time on Twitter instead – which I don’t regret, and would do again – I remember at some point thinking “wow all of my best thoughts are now on Twitter, I haven’t written anything really good off-Twitter in a long while.”
That’s changed somewhat, I’m proud of The Library Ethos on my blog and We Were Voyagers on my Substack. But those are two essays, and I feel like I have a hundred more where that came from. And, good news, I have room for 180 more wordvomits in the context of this project. So maybe instead of trying to polish drafts to make them substack worthy, I could just rattle them off to completion and publish them as wordvomits. That’s entirely consistent with the original goal and premise of this wordvomit project.
There’s a bunch of research and reading I want to do. I really want to do something about amateur historians and librarians throughout history. I also want to write something about Sanity For Deviants. I feel like I can vaguely sense the possibility of a hyper-productive phase where I turn loads of crappy drafts into less-crappy wordvomits, and once I have that I think it will be easier and clearer for me to see what the substack essays should be. There’s something kind of exciting and liberating about that. I love the feeling of words just pouring out of my fingers without much interference from my conscious mind. I do believe there is a truth to the idea that the artist’s job is to get out of the way. I haven’t gotten out of my own way much this year. Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself. I want to continue to practice relaxation, being cosy, gentle, and let the words spill out.
I want to take a moment to appreciate myself for coming this far, in the widest sense. Hey, I’m 32 years old, I’m alive, I pay the bills, I have a wife and two cats, I have friends, I’ve sold thousands of ebooks, I have good ideas, good vibes, I think I’m generally a positive influence in the world in a way that would delight my younger self. I just get so quickly caught up in the worries of the present and the future. And when I do that I guess there’s a part of me that locks down in resistance. Like who tf do I think I am to demand so much of myself in such a clunky way? I know I am capable of more, but I can’t just demand it like a shitty boss. I have to treat myself well. I have to make myself comfortable. I want to do those things. i want to have a good time, and I want to be a shining example of what it’s like to have a good time – not so much because it’ll impress other people, honestly that’s nice but past a certain threshold it’s not that necessary – but because it’ll actually make a positive difference to people, and I know I have that power/capacity within me. To help people. And that’s what a beautiful life could look like. The challenge is not to grip too tightly, not to be too assertive/insistent, which borders on tyrannical. You can’t force people to be better, you can’t impose better on yourself or others. It has to be smarter than that. It has to be more thoughtful, more sensitive than that. I dream of elegance. I used to dream of brute power, but now I am learning to dream of elegance. I think elegance is a much lovelier kind of power.
that’s a beautiful phrase, there’s something there. all my best ideas, phrasing, framing, comes in the middle, en route to something else, secret back alley shortcuts. I want to help myself see this more clearly. this reinforces my conviction that i should do the wordvomits about the essay ideas. those wordvomits should reveal surprising things for me to explore that I think will then become the substack essays I want. it’s becoming clear to me now. i think i should be able to sleep peacefully tonight.