- What is the animating spirit of this post? I think this post is about navigating internal conflicts, dynamic tensions. Feels a bit on the nose to make it about ayy lmao, but that’s the leading obvious choice. maybe it’ll be the conclusion
- Sometimes I get visions of clarity – a sense of how everything in my life might just come together and “just work”. But these visions don’t persist, the emotional quality withers away and I am left thrashing around blindly trying to recreate what had seemed so obvious and natural sometimes just hours earlier
- Struggling with things that used to be easy: I used to write in starbucks when I was 20, and maybe I’m looking back with rose-tinted glasses but I don’t particularly recall being conflicted about what I was writing. I just wrote down whatever was on my mind. Well, what’s on my mind now, and why don’t I just write it? Part of it is that I’m worried about outcomes. Maybe I know too much about the world now, and that can be a bad thing, because it can be kinda paralyzing. I anticipate bad outcomes. “People are confused and don’t really get it” is something I subconsciously marked as a bad outcome. But as I think out loud about it, is it really bad? Isn’t it worse if I’m paralyzed into inaction? I remember struggling with some version of this while working on my book, and I wonder how much of that struggle was necessary. I think about Miyazaki’s pained process. Is pain necessary in the process? Some amount of it seems unavoidable, but I would be wary about romanticizing suffering.
- novelty vs depth: I’m torn between trying to write something fresh and new off the top of my head, and digging deep into my past material to look for depth, resonance. A part of me feels some survivor’s guilt for having made it this far as a creative – I know there are others who don’t, and a part of me feels like “I have to make it count.” But here too once I write it down I find myself thinking, how would I feel if I was one of those who didn’t make it, and I could speak with someone who did? I would not want them to suffer on my behalf. I can do that by myself. I would in fact want them to be happy, joyous, delighted on my behalf. And I feel an actual, palpable relief at this realization. So you see in real time how writing has a positive impact on me.
- order vs chaos: I’m torn between drafting and freestyling. Order and chaos. Structure and madness. When I write it down, again, the nuance reveals itself to me. The point is the dynamism. It’s like saying “I’m torn between inhaling and exhaling”. You gotta do both, silly! So, alright, where am I in the process right now? I am freestyling in this document. When I start to feel tired of freestyling, I can switch and start sorting through my drafts. And I can keep going with that until I get tired of that, and then I can switch back to freestyling. Or I can step away from my computer and take a nap, or a walk, whatever feels right in the moment. I know from experience that there is a wisdom in my body, my felt sense, that is more sensitive than my thinky-talky conscious mind. Part of what I love about writing when I do it well is that if I go fast enough, I can outrun the thinky-talky conscious mind. And I know from experience that this can actually be a gift that I give to other people, and with enough practice and auxillary skills, I can even do it for a living, get paid for it. (elaboration re: introspect? journalling?) I suppose here I wanna say, well then once I get there, I’m torn between doing what feels natural in my self-interest, and thinking about other people. Man is a social creature, others-interest is in my self-interest…
- Letting go of being overpremptive? I also want to think out loud about how… annoying… I am… to myself? Am I really annoying to myself, or am I being overpremptive about how I know the way that I am is annoying to others? A topic to cry about. I often find myself wanting to do a little bit of everything. I know that if you want to please the bulk of readers, the way to do it is to make things accessible for them, signpost things with clarity, promise them something reassuring, easy to parse, direct shots of meaning. I used to spend a lot of time in that headspace, as a marketer. And then I sought to spend as much time as I could away from that headspace, to nourish the more complex, conflicted, rich, forested parts of me. And I think I’ve done a decent job of that. And now it’s time for me to synthesize. It’s time for me to ayy.
- I want to talk about so many things… the tricky thing is figuring out what is relevant, what I want to include, how to give structure and meaning to a piece, without throwing in so many random things that aren’t relevant. What is relevance? What is a detail that adds to a story rather than detracts from it? That’s a matter of aesthetic resonance, which feels like a topic of a separate essay. It’s hard to know where things begin and where things end, which joints to cleave at. It takes practice, I guess. You try a few different things and feel it out, feel what resonates. When I reflect on how I’ve been feeling a bit stuck lately, I think a bunch of it is that I descend into a bit of a scarcity mindset. Like I already have 20 drafts,