It’s 1am and I am tired and also feeling somewhat unfulfilled by how I’ve spent my day. Scrolling around, shuffling my notes around, wishing I published something on my substack, and realizing i’m too tired, it’s too late. And then it occurred to me that I could write a wordvomit, which is something I almost forgot is an option! It’s funny. I guess there was a time when writing wordvomits was my “escape” from my everyday life, and now that I am basically a full time writer, I sort of forget about it, or don’t think about it. But this is precisely the sort of thing I want to get better at discerning.
I have said a few times lately that I feel sad for people who are, there’s no nice way to put it, incompetent losers. It’s a real feeling that I have, and I think there’s something in there I maybe oughta examine, but maybe I oughta do it in “private” or in relative privacy like these wordvomits, rather than something even more public-facing like my twitter or my substack. I don’t want to linger on it for too long, I want to get to the heart of it, identify the knot, untangle it, address it, resolve it, move on with my life to doing other nerd shit. Hey, I did some reading about zines and xerox today. That counts for something. I’m a little too harsh on myself still. Maybe I’m a little too focused on outputs and I should give myself a bit more grace regarding the inputs. There’s definitely room for me to continue getting better at how I manage my process – there probably always will be room for that.
And hey, I know that right here in these wordvomits I used to basically describe myself as an incompetent loser, maybe not by using those exact words, but it was a thing that troubled me deeply. And yeah ideally it would be cool if we could live in a world where such things aren’t even a factor, they don’t even matter, where everyone is worthy of love and kindness and decency and everyone has great parents and a great upbringing and lives in a wholesome encouraging abundant society. But that’s not the world that we live in right now, that is the world that we are hopefully manifesting, with the knowledge that we will die without that work having been completed. But hopefully some progress will be made and our kids will have a better shot than we did.
I’m always thinking of old friends who are no longer in my life. Always feeling kinda bad for not being great at correspondence, at gifts, at being thoughtful. But I think I’ve mostly made my peace with the kind of person I am. Some people appreciate it. Some people find me irksome. I’ve tried my best not to be. For a long time… (started a thread here):
a thing that tormented throughout my teens and early 20s was something like “how do I know if I’m trying my best”
I still don’t really know the answer but I also don’t really care very much in the same agonized way. I do what I can and if it’s not enough then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
there are a bunch of markers that I take as evidence that i’ve pushed myself too hard – my eyes get hot, my sleep goes to shit, i get grumpy and irritable, i start entering a state resembling burnout – and usually my “productivity” goes to shit like weeks before that
and ironically like. my peak productive phases hardly feel like i’m working at all. sometimes i have ‘hot streaks’ where i write tons, everything comes together, everything is flowing. i still remember i think there was a day in 2015 when I wrote 15,000 words in a single sitting
i’m sorta deflecting by talking about work. work is comparatively easy. the hard area is relationships. and i’m thinking about like, how some friends love me so completely for who i am, and how some others have bristled at me for not being enough in the ways they wanted
and i wonder if even here maybe i am a step removed from a deeper question i haven’t inhabited in a while, which is how i feel about myself right now. i think overall i’m doing pretty good. but a part of me always expects more from myself. and i dont think it’s a selfish or insecure thing, I think it’s more like… I know I have the capacity to help more people. people use phrases like “savior/messiah complex” to describe this sometimes but the way i think about it is like. one more kid bro. you could help one more kid like yourself feel less alone
but then of course the messy recursive thing is… being a self-sacrificial martyr type doesn’t help. the deepest way to help is to demonstrate by example what it looks like to be happy, well-adjusted, have good boundaries, rest, and so on. a word i’ve been returning to lately is “discernment”. the same thing can feel right or wrong in different contexts. gotta be discerning, gotta pay attention to how it feels, there is no externalized fixed frame for what is good, there is no escaping the necessity of discernment. you do what you can, you grieve what you can’t, and you take care of yourself so you can keep playing. fighting spirit! fighting spirit! fighting spirit!
(that’s not going to make sense to anyone but that’s alright lol not everything has to make sense to everyone all the time)
So… what next? I should call it a night and go to bed. It’s kind of funny that that’s one of the important things I need to learn. To know when to fold, basically. It’s funny, as I approach the end my brain is fried and I’m not quite sure how I want to end it. I seriously contemplated just deleting the whole thing because it doesn’t feel super great. But that doesn’t feel right either. So I’m sort of… grasping for something, some semblance of a conclusion, something that a future version of myself will be amused or interested to read. What, general encouragement? He doesn’t need that. I would probably just remind myself to… signpost stuff better? Not quite. Take more risks? Talk to more people? I don’t know, I’m not in the mood to give advice or suggestions. Take care of yourself, I guess!! By which I mean take care of me! And our past and future selves! Thanks!! hahaha