It’s 4am, just got home from dinner with the in-laws and have been lounging around on the computer for a while. Just learned that Shanti Pereira broke her own national record and won a second gold at the SEA games for 200m after 7 years, so thrilled for her. I want to do a status update. I haven’t done a status update wordvomit in a while, it feels like. Really, my wordvomits project has been on the backburner for a long time. I can’t remember when precisely it started to slow down – could look this up but I don’t feel like it right now – but I would guess it coincided roughly with the time my Twitter started taking off. Around the time I left my job. 2018 or so. A part of me surely hoped to be done with @1000wordvomits before 2020. It’s 2022 now. I’m not sure if I wrote much about the pandemic. I’m not sure I wrote very much at all. I tweeted a lot. I sure tweeted a hell of a lot.

And I wrote two ebooks. The first one, Friendly Ambitious Nerd I was proud to get out of my system – and I remain convinced that there is a great book inside there somewhere, but I need to edit and rework it substantially for it to happen. My second book, Introspect, was a much more ambitious undertaking, much more emotionally difficult to write, and it took me much longer than I had hoped. But now Introspect too is done. Two “big works”, at least that’s how it feels like from my current frame of reference. There’s a decent chance that, 10 years from now, the things I’m known for will be very different than FAN and Introspect, and those will seem like mere specks in the distant past.

I shipped Introspect in February 2022. It’s May now. It’s been a few months and I feel like I still haven’t fully recovered. I should’ve gone on a holiday of some sort, I didn’t. I had a celebratory dinner here, played some video games there. To some degree, working on my book felt like I was avoiding everything else in my life (including my extremely patient wife who endures me at my most vacant, distant, and unresponsive). And now that the book is done, I feel like I have all sorts of shit I ought to be doing.

Cigs: Oh, the big thing I did after shipping Introspect was that I stopped smoking cigarettes, 99% of the time. I got a tattoo to celebrate the book (and really the inward journey I had to go through in order to write the book). I’ve tweeted and said a couple of times, if you’re serious about positioning, it can change your positions. And if you’re serious about writing a book like Introspect, you have to introspect, and that includes investigating your copes, and I found that smoking was a cope that I wanted to get rid of. And so I stopped smoking. I’ve had a couple of cigarettes here and there with friends since, my choice each time, but still. I’ve smoked something like a total of 7 cigarettes in 2 months, which was what I used to smoke every single day before. I don’t know if I’ll ever go 0 cigs for years at a time, but I definitely go weeks at a time now, and I’m happy to think of that as progress. It does feel qualitatively different. Cigarettes are no longer intertwined with the core architecture of my day-to-day life. I think that’s the critical thing. I will likely write and vlog more about this in the coming weeks. Several people have been texting and DM-ing me to tell me that witnessing me tweet about my non-smoking journey has inspired them to do the same with their own coping mechanisms (cigarettes, alcohol, other drugs, other things) and it’s been such a wonderful feeling. I’d like to do more of that for people.

✱

Time To Introspect .Took a break from writing this wordvomit, it’s now 1230am 2022may18 but I want to just finish this and get it out of my system anyway. Did I talk about feeling scattered? A little bit. Yeah I feel very scattered. There are many different directions that I could be going in now that I don’t have a single book looming over me (as a project to finish). Do I update my blog? Work on my youtube channel? One answer that seems “intellectually sound” is, well, work on a little bit of everything every day. Maybe I’ll try that. But if I sit with my feelings I know that that’s actually a kind of copout. Distributing one’s eggs evenly is the move of a person who doesn’t really know what they want, what they believe, what they care about. And… so it makes sense to sit down and figure out what I want. Oh, to Introspect. Right. The thing I just wrote a whole book about. Ha Ha. Well the funny thing is that I haven’t quite had the time to do it, while writing about how to do it. I did do some of it, but something about it was different… I was stress-testing things, pushing myself to my limits, investigating deep childhood shit… and it was all secondary in service of writing the book. Now that the book is done I guess I can do it more properly now, which is why I feel eager to get back on the wagon with writing these word vomits.

I also broadly want to do a notes cleanup, but at this point it’s starting to dawn on me that maybe my notes will never be cleaned up, lol. Marie Kondo would suggest setting aside some time to really go deep and hard with it, and I think there’s a wisdom in that. Some other people might suggest doing a little bit every day, and I think there’s some wisdom in that too, if you’re assertive about it and aren’t pussyfooting around. It feels like a lot of my life has been about me cultivating the courage to act more decisively. Well, I got a tattoo, which a part of a younger version of me might not have believed I would ever do. Surprise! Life is full of surprises. Let’s see what surprises lie ahead.