I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself \u2013 I hadn\u2019t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven\u2019t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day of my free agent life, and the 2nd day that I\u2019m not at work. It\u2019s 850am \u2013 I woke up naturally, without any alarm. I feel a pretty strong impulse to check Twitter (because I know there are surely notifications waiting for me), but I\u2019m trying to make sure that I write and finish this vomit first before I start checking on those things.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a worry I had \u2013 I had written a bunch of essay ideas on my whiteboard a few days (weeks?) ago. I took pictures of them so that I would be able to follow up on them as necessary. I hoped that each one would be able to be written as a word vomit. When I looked at them a couple of days ago, however, I found myself feeling a little trapped. I felt like many of those essays would have required reading and research, and I didn\u2019t quite feel up to it at the time. And I worried, just for a moment, that maybe I\u2019m not a writer.<\/p>\n
What a silly, cursed thought. There is truth in that experience, but it isn\u2019t in the conclusion. What it reveals to me is that there\u2019s some writing that flows very naturally without any sort of research or reading, and there\u2019s some writing that needs to be grounded in research \u2013 because I\u2019m writing about things that I don\u2019t completely understand, things that require facts and context that I don\u2019t have readily available in my head.<\/p>\n
I have developed a pretty good mechanism for writing about that sort of thing: the twitter thread. There\u2019s something about the 280characters + 4 pictures per tweet format that forces me to write in a way that\u2019s practical, sensible, digestible. (Aaaand this was where I hopped over to Twitter and spent about an hour there, probably. Now it\u2019s 1020am.)<\/p>\n
So. Where was I. Yes. I want to write lots of word vomits. But I don\u2019t want to repeat the same thing over and over again. That said, there\u2019s a limited range of things that I can talk about at length without having to pause over and over again. So what do I do?<\/p>\n
First of all, I think doing status updates \u2013 I\u2019m talking about emotional states, psychological states \u2013 is something that would be useful and somewhat novel since I haven\u2019t done these in a while.<\/p>\n
Actually, what I\u2019m seeing myself say here is that I should just write about all of my feelings as much as I can. Because that\u2019s one thing that I haven\u2019t spent a lot of time with, and it\u2019s something that I can talk about at length. Maybe I should go through each emotion one by one \u2013 I talked about sadness recently. What about all the others? Yes. I want to do that! I want to get to know myself better. I want to feel all the feelings, and catalogue them, and make sense of them. I also want to clear out all my notes and todo list items. I will work on that after publishing this vomit.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
I stopped this vomit halfway and I didn\u2019t get back to it until a couple of days later. What is the overall gist of what I had written in the previous half? \u201cDo status updates\u201d? \u201cUse formats and contexts to help you think better\u201d? Was I trying to motivate myself? Face up to your fear of not-writing, and… accept it. Don\u2019t deny it. Realize that what you\u2019re trying to do is harder than you thought it was. If it was going to be easy, you would already have done it. Having more freedom doesn\u2019t automatically mean you\u2019re going to start doing it effortlessly. The reason you weren\u2019t doing it was because it required more effort than you could have mustered. And now you have more time and energy, so theoretically you should be able to expend more effort. But it\u2019s still scary and intimidating to try something harder than anything you\u2019ve tried before.<\/p>\n
So the message is this \u2013 brace yourself for effort-shock, and decide to power through it. This sounds awfully close to \u201cjust do it\u201d, which I suppose is the ultimate distillation of the idea here. But there\u2019s a reason why I chose to get more nuanced (and to be honest, part of that reason is always to avoid confronting the simple-but-hard solution of :just do it\u201d). I already have several vomits that are in the spirit of \u201cjust fucking do it\u201d. But… do what? Expend your energy writing more essays about how you should Just Do It? That\u2019s a frustrating sort of circle-jerk that doesn\u2019t accomplish anything. So what do you want to accomplish? Clarify that. I want to build a tribe. What tribe? Towards what end? I want to expand global human consciousness. Okay, now there\u2019s a horizon worth looking at. What\u2019s the first step towards that? I think Twitter threads are a good place to start, since I\u2019ve somehow amassed a bit of a following over there. Twitter threads that get people thinking, seeing better.<\/p>\n
In some sense, this word vomit project has kind of… achieved it\u2019s original purpose, maybe. But I still have 300,000 words to go, so I need to imagine something new and different. I think I would like the remainder of these vomits to explore my emotional landscape, my psychological landscape, my fears, desires, wants, goals, feelings, worries, anxieties. These are things that I can talk about at length without having to do any research. That isn\u2019t a cop out \u2013 it\u2019s not that I want to avoid research-driven writing, I definitely want to do more of that. But I don\u2019t think this is the place for it. So I will write that elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Now, what\u2019s a title to summaries all of this? Clarify your goals, expect effort-shock, take concrete steps every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself \u2013 I hadn\u2019t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven\u2019t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day of my free agent life, and the 2nd… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[709,304],"class_list":["post-10796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-baby-steps","tag-gtd"],"yoast_head":"\n