Words spill out of me. Every day I wake up and I write a bunch of tweets. I don’t consciously plan these. They just happen. They happen almost in spite of me. Not all of them are good, but some of them end up being better than I imagine possible. The challenge for me as I see it is to do the same with everything else, especially these essays
Every day I wake up and I find myself in a different mood. It’s been raining for about a month in Singapore, it’s relatively cold and dreary, and I found myself frustrated because it felt like it was “interfering with my process.” But I also find myself thinking, “The world isn’t consistent, darling, so why do you expect yourself to be?” In the video game The Outer Worlds, there’s a scene where a character Vicar Max goes on a sort of vision quest and encounters an idealised version of himself, who chides him – “I don’t exist, yet you compare yourself to me, why?”
I have many idealised fantasies about all sorts of things. Hundreds of drafts of essays that could have been. There’s nothing wrong with having drafts. The issue in my case is that, when I’m not careful, I stumble into this needy affliction of trying to make an essay happen when it doesn’t want to happen. This is completely different than how I do my tweets. Maybe there’s something about the scale and scope of it. A “failed tweet” doesn’t cost much, doesn’t mean anything. A while ago I cleared out hundreds of draft tweets – typically I started typing something and then I lost interest in it midway, I got distracted, or I wasn’t feeling it, and I abandoned it.
A part of me feels obliged to lay out all of these drafts on paper, to go through them, to do them justice, to keep them in my heart and to weave them into my work. This is a nice gesture, but it’s often overwrought. Some of that endeavor is helpful, but I expect too much from it. Realistically, my most powerful work happens when I allow “the spirit” to move me. The word “inspire” originally meant something like “to breathe”, and I know that I have tweets and notes about the folly of trying to rely on fossilized inspiration. It’s like hoping for different weather. It doesn’t work. Not directly. Sometimes if I’m lucky I might encounter some piece of fossilized inspiration from the past that happens to be relevant to my current situation, and that’s always wonderful when it happens. But I can’t count on it happening. Rather, I have to face each moment fresh, anew.
was reading a thing recently about a successful woman who’s struggling to find romance. And to project my own thoughts and feelings onto a bit of text, I think a lot of the issue is that she seems so compelled to bring up her success when talking about herself. And I have sympathy for that, I imagine it comes from a painful, difficult place. It might be that she was diminished and dismissed when she was younger, and so she needs to prove herself, maybe mainly to herself. And she describes men as being intimidated by her – and there may be a truth to that – but I wonder, and really again here I’m wondering about myself – I wonder if really they find her exhausting or tedious to deal with. “They’re intimidated by my brilliance” can be a great cover story for “I am bad at relating to people in a way that doesn’t lead with me demanding validation for my accolades and accomplishments.” And when you dig deeper into that it gets pretty sad. Which isn’t to say that brilliance isn’t intimidating! I once read someone say “It must have been as difficult as it was wonderful to be Montaigne,” and I think she’s right. But dynamic brilliance learns to manage that difficulty. If you’re so smart, why haven’t you learnt to subvert the process by which people are intimidated by how smart you are?
There’s a great scene in The Dark Knight Rises where Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is trying to climb out of a subterranean prison. He previously had his back broken, and nitpickers here might be gleeful in pointing out that there’s no way anybody could recover from a back injury like that from doing pushups and whatnot. But the whole thing is really meant to be symbolic rather than literal. One of the critical messages of that scene is that, to make the leap, to make the climb, the hero has to leave behind the rope that they were carrying with them. They have to arrive “naked”, unprepared, no rehearsed remarks, no drafts, no list of past successes and accomplishments and accolades. You see this alluded to elsewhere too – in How To Train Your Dragon, our boy Hiccup has to toss the instructions and trust his intuition in order to enter a symbiotic state with his dragon Toothless.
✱
I got my first tattoo after publishing my second book, Introspect, when I was 31 years old. I’ve been nerding out about tattoos for many years. I’ve been thinking about the kinds of tattoos I might want to get even since before I was old enough to get one. At the same time, I was a bit of a “perfectionist”, especially knowing that tattoos are permanent, I really wanted my tattoos to be deeply, profoundly meaningful to me. I wanted my tattoos to be talismans. And I know that not everybody feels that way. Some people get a bunch of tattoos just for fun, and I respect their right to make that decision, and I can even see how it might be an excellent decision for them. So it’s hard for me to articulate my general philosophy of tattoos, because it’s more like a dozen stray philosophies in a trenchcoat. They might loosely map onto something like archetypes or MBTI, but I wouldn’t fixate too much on any particular system. Really the point is just to understand that variety is a thing, diversity is a thing.
Too little butter scraped over too much bread, is how I feel about a lot of my past drafts. A part of me is tempted to try and recreate all of them from scratch, without looking. But that’s not very strong for me right now. I can respect that sometimes that impulse makes sense, but right now I don’t think so. Right now I’d rather… go through each thing, summarize it into a bunch of bullet points…