Earlier this morning I wrote 1,500 words, and then I dumped them in my junkyard (below, lol). I feel pretty good about it. Those words didn’t feel fresh. I was reciting cached old thoughts and meandering through tedious old patterns. I don’t think that’s bad, in fact I’m quite happy to have gotten that out of my system.
I used to fret over, “Well, what do I do with this? Where do I put it? Is it dishonest if I leave it out of my published material?” But now my process is: first write whatever comes to your fingers. Then, if it doesn’t feel great, dump it in the junkyard. A secondary worry I used to have was, “well, then doesn’t the junkyard keep piling larger and larger, such that it becomes overwhelming and incomprehensible?” Yes.
I did have a great little bit which I will now quote:
“Until the very recent “deep truths” and “crackle-boom” moment of clarity I had several days ago… I was growing despondent. I felt like an weary-anxious potter who was knee-deep in wet clay, and everywhere I turned, every step I took, I’d just get more and more clay all over myself, and for a harrowing moment it really seemed like I was going to suffocate to death underneath my own unfinished, metastasizing body of work.”
Wew. Pretty bleak stuff. Dark have been my dreams of late, creatively speaking. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either. If you’re going to go into the labyrinth, into the subterranean caves, into the dark forest, that’s what it’s going to feel like. But if you have your sword and thread, then you can journey inwards and confront your Minotaur — that within ourselves which we have shunned as shameful, unworthy — then we can face our truest, deepest selves. “Where we had thought to find an abomination,” wrote Joseph Campbell, “we shall find a god.” We can welcome ourselves home, and feel a surge of courage and light, and at the center of our being, we know who we are, we know the way, and we shall be with all the world.
So, what now? I don’t want to spend all my time talking about my personal transformation. I want to live it. And what does living it look like? For me, it means… being transparent about my desires, my curiosities, my interests. I want to write some good, challenging, contentious shit. If I’m not scared to write it, I don’t want to write it. If it doesn’t surprise me, I don’t want to write it.
2023may13
I’ve written a lot over the years. Why?
More than a million words easily, maybe even over two million. There’s a lot more that I want to write still. But when I reflect on it, it does make me pause and wonder, why am I doing it? What is it for, what is it about? I could say “it’s a mystery!”, and there’s a truth in that, and yet I think it’s also worthwhile to attempt to answer the seemingly unanswerable.
I could say that I write to express myself. Part of self-expression is about relief, about finding internal alignment and resonance – to find the words that accurately describe the emotional state that I’m in. There’s something like a “tetris effect” there. When I write something well, it “clears out”. There’s a sense in which, as crude as it might sound, it honestly really is like taking a good shit. And this rhymes with something I’ve been thinking about lately (get your motor running), about how creativity is not about the output – the output is the exhaust – creativity is about throughput. It’s about the entire chain from start to finish. It’s about enjoying that entire process.
Part of it is about joy, and discovery, and delight.
Right now, what feels resonant for me is the idea that I write to surprise myself.
I like this idea because… the idea of being surprised is something that introduces some novelty into the equation. It encourages me to parlay with the unknown. I get dispirited when I feel like I’m working entirely in the realm of the known. There’s no surprise there, I’m just doing tedious gruntwork. But when I think about it, it’s possible to work with known material, to arrive at some surprising configuration of the known. That can be delightful. This is where interesting creative challenges come up.
Here’s an example of a challenge I’m looking forward to: My book Introspect has a total of 33 sections, and each section ends with a one-page “poetic summary”. But I didn’t put in a ton of time and energy into those one-pagers, I simply freestyled. Which was decent, but not amazing. I hereby challenge myself to elevate those one-pagers. I think that should have some interesting knock-on effects, like– to make those poetic pages good, I’ll have to really dig into the sections and discern the most crucial elements. It should force me to make the book better – even if I’m not technically working with any new or unknown elements. And since I don’t currently know what exactly the updated pages will be like, I will very likely be surprised along the way.
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knotted and overwhelmed – compress into one para
overwhelmed with drafts// I have a lot of notes, a lot of drafts, many unfinished pieces, and in recent months I’ve felt oppressively overwhelmed by them. Until the very recent “deep truths” and “crackle-boom” moment of clarity I had several days ago… I was growing despondent. I felt like an weary-anxious potter who was knee-deep in wet clay, and everywhere I turned, every step I took, I’d just get more and more clay all over myself, and for a moment it really seemed like I was going to suffocate to death underneath my own growing unfinished body of work. I never seriously considered calling it quits– it’s been obvious for a long time that writing is my vocation, and that I will be writing for the rest of my life… but this was a sombre, dismal state.
knottedness // It’s probably true that I might’ve benefited from a break, but I didn’t want to do that, either. Ideas about emotional knottedness come to mind. When you have a knot in a muscle, simply resting doesn’t bring relief. You have to get into the knot somehow. You need to do something dynamic to release the tension. Lying in bed all day can actually make it worse. Similarly, I believe that emotional knottedness, or creative knottedness, often needs some kind of dynamic solution. I needed to write my way out. And I think I’m halfway through that process right now.
I just did a search for “emotional knottedness” on my twitter, and a click here and there and I found myself back in 2021, when I was knotted about Introspect, the book I was working on at the time. And here the startling insight is that facing the truth of the matter is something that provides relief.
(branching path: voltaic essay on dynamism)
There are many different things that I want to do, and it can be tricksy to tease apart what are the things that arise from my body, my heart, my emotional felt sense, and what are the things that my conscious thinky-talky authoritarian mind has imposed top-down. But navigating by surprise and delight seems to be the correct approach.
I could talk for a bit about some of the plans? The big dream is to write some sprawling epics about culture and media. But I’m conflicted because I haven’t yet found the right angles, the right frames. I’ve been thinking of doing some book reviews, or maybe talk about movies and tv shows. I’ve been wanting to do some recent-history overviews, like of the past couple of decades.
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Finding my footing – Compress into one para
I’m still feeling out this Substack format. It’s clear that I’m still in the early phase of finding my footing, my groove. I did a lot of planning-work, maybe a little too much. Definitely a little too much. It was starting to affect my health adversely. My sleep is still affected. I went to bed exhausted last night at 10pm. I woke up a few hours ago, and I got out of bed at 5am to write this. Is this a smart thing to do? It’s pretty questionable. If I publish something, that would make it worthwhile. But I do have a history of writing up deranged drafts that never get published. And I find myself feeling a certain sorrow for those drafts that didn’t make it. But the branching paths essay reminded me, even the drafts that don’t make it, contribute to the resonance of the whole. So I have some relief there.
I’m fairly confident though that this piece is going to finish itself and get published. Because I’m on a hot streak. My motor is running. Previously I was despairing at the grand vision that I was struggling to manifest, but now I have a simpler, smaller vision – which is a branch of the greater tree – that I’m quite excited to live into. What changed? What’s the difference? Well, the grandiose vision is idealized, inhuman, perfect. The small vision is one of little wonders. The grandiose vision tries to straddle the entire world, the smaller vision lives into possibility in the present moment. And the delightful thing is to discover that the present moment is an eternity.
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I have a Google doc that’s titled “notes on status”. You can check it out if you like. It’s not particularly coherent. It’s basically a grab-bag of tweets and notes. A thing I would like to do, is to reassemble those notes into something more coherent. I know I have the skills to do it. I refined those skills years ago – I used to work as a content marketer at a software company, and one of the things I enjoyed doing together with a colleague who did illustrations, was collect dozens of quotes from people about certain topics – and it might be something like ‘How to do search engine optimization” or “how to promote your blog”. I’d assemble maybe 50+ quotes and look for patterns in what people were saying. I’d typically find that they often reduced down to maybe 7-12 things. I’d then lay out those 7-12 things in a linear narrative. I found that to be immensely satisfying. I suppose you could describe it as storyboarding, or story-diagramming.
My first book, Friendly Ambitious Nerd, isn’t really a book. It’s a barely-coherent grab-bag of tweets and blogposts and notes. But I’m glad that I published it, as unfinished and incomplete as it is, because the conversations I’ve had with people about it since, and witnessing people talk about it with each other, is precisely what gives me the context I need to update it to be better. I do not think I could’ve made it much better by agonizing over it longer.
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What do I want to do with this piece? It’s been a bunch of handwringing about knottedness and tiredness and many-drafts. Where’s the fun? Where’s the joy? What’s next? What’s the surprise? What am I surprised about? What’s the title, what’s the subtitle? Creative exercises I give people? That should go in my marketing blog, right? Or do I want to talk about it here?
people-shaped… is a separate essay or idea than this one
Do I want to bring some junkyard ideas into this essay? Think about the reader experience. Resonance, Yeet thyself, Branching Paths…
I could do a dump…
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(abandoned substack draft)
Walking over the same old ground
“Running over the same old ground,
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here”
– Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
I was going through some old notes and I found one from late 2018 where I talked about “junkyard bankruptcy” and “fragmented feelings”. It’s funny, striking and in some ways kind of sad, that the ‘issues I was dealing with’ remain the same. (And here I find myself wondering, why is that how I choose to describe it? Is there a healthier way to describe it?) I wrote about how I felt overwhelmed by all my notes, how my body of work was already too large for me to comprehend.
In the 5 years since, my junkyard has only grown larger, denser… when I’m feeling good, I think of it as more bountiful, but sometimes it feels oppressive. Do I want to be rid of it? Not exactly. I dream of resonance. I dream of clarity. I yearn for it to all magically sort itself out.
Tangentially? In parallel? I find myself thinking about fashion, voice, style, aesthetics. One of my many long-stewing drafts is about aesthetic resonance. Maybe it’ll be easier to talk about it as a sidenote in this essay, rather than a standalone essay by itself. Let’s work with fashion. We each have a body. The body has a shape, and it has skin, and hair, and each person’s configuration of attributes is unique to them. I’m tall, skinny, dark, and the fashion that works for my frame is different than the fashion that might work for someone with a different body. It would be unwise for me to try and adopt the stylings and affectations of someone with a completely different body, with a different life, different inclinations, instincts, ‘animation’, vibes. There’s a bit of a chicken/egg causality complication here, but: each person is at their most resplendent when they are in tune with the aesthetics that are right for them. When I wear the right clothes for me, I feel more confident, more complete, more whole. I conduct myself with more conviction. I’m at ease.
Think about say, sexiness. There are many different ways to be sexy. Some ways are more famous or popular in mainstream imagination. The first thing that comes to mind for me is a mental image of Marilyn Monroe. A quick google image search for “sexy” brings up Kim Kardashian, sultry in a black bikini, smokey eyes, pouted lips. Megan Fox, similarly done up
I have yet to find a better way of “figuring out” my aesthetics than raw trial-and-error. And maybe that might be different for someone else, but this is my jam.
With each passing year, as I accumulate more life experience and reflect on it, and corroborate it with other people, and the reading I’ve done, I’ve become more convinced that each person has to do what is right for them according to their own creative process. The outfits and the creative output – writing, speaking, even just moving through life – are emergent from the process. The process is what is most important, everything else that other people admire is really just “exhaust” from that process.
Lost writings
When I was a teenager, I used to blog on a somewhat obscure platform called Diary-X. It was run by one guy named Stephen Deken. As Wikipedia puts it: “In early 2006, the server’s hard drive failed, and since there was no backup, the entire website and all users’ diaries were lost irretrievably.” It feels slightly strange to say it now, but this devastated me. Hundreds of pages of my writing from my adolescence were gone forever, and I will never be able to revisit them, access them, get a sense of myself.
When I was in the military a few years later, around 2010 or 2011, I had been keeping a paper journal in an old lined notebook from school. I filled it out judiciously. And one day I lost it. This too was a painful loss.
Both of these felt like accidents beyond my control. But there’s another that comes to mind. I was blogging on my own domain, on a wordpress blog, for several years. And eventually I found myself feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with it, and I decided that I would do a major cleanup. And so I “condensed” a majority of the posts into a handful of “summary” posts, and it seems I deleted the posts. I’ve come to regret this.
I also wrote for a couple of online magazines, one named Fever Avenue and the other, Poached Magazine. I wrote my heart out in some of those posts. They’re both gone now. I had enough foresight to save some of my favorite posts and repost them on Medium and such, but nonetheless, I feel a sense of loss. I get so upset and mad about it.
Trauma is a heavy word. But even without using it, when I sit with my feelings about these things, I realize that I’m still shaken by these events. It’s surely a part of why I’m so compulsive about doing my elaborate web of twitter threads. And I know that maybe one day Twitter will be gone, like sands to time, teardrops in rain.
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Library book sale
When I was in the military, I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had a lot of time. And one of the things I set out to do was to give myself the education that I felt I deserved, that I felt I had been deprived of in school. Every year in Singapore the National Library does a book sale, letting go old “decommissioned” books for $2 each. I remember I would lug my army duffel bag to the convention hall and I would fill it up with books. I bought maybe 70 books each time, spending more than half of my monthly allowance, such that I would have almost no spending money for myself. Nevertheless I was delighted. I bought and read books about physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, history, political science, anything that seemed “important”. And I was very excited about it for a while. If I recall correctly, I had once attempted to read Plato’s Republic when I was in my early teens, and it made no sense to me. It made perfect sense once I was in the army and confronted with questions about bureaucracy and national sovereignty. From the library book sale I got books like Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell and Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion – two books that I would say changed my life deeply. I bought them for $2 each, and if I had to put monetary numbers on their impact right now, I might say I value having read them at like… $40,000, maybe. I’d like to say it’s more than that.
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More junk
I have over 1,000 notes in my Notes app on my iPhone. I have almost 24,000 images in my Photos app. I have over 225,000 tweets, over 1,000 blogposts across different blogs, maybe a million words in comments on all sorts of forums all over the place. I’ve written and self-published two ebooks. All of it feels like it’s building up to something. To what? Am I sharing all these numbers because I have something to prove? Who am I trying to prove something to? Maybe “my parents”, but that doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe “my old childhood friends”. That doesn’t feel quite right either. The Singaporean establishment? I felt some relief at learning about how some people in government think about me, but not all that much. I feel like I’m inching towards Zuko’s “I’m angry at myself!” – that I have a… superego? It’s interesting. Probably the person that I think it would be healthiest for me to want to impress might be my ex-boss, and yet I don’t consciously make an effort to. I’m proud of myself for no longer feeling a need to prove myself to random internet strangers who accost me out of the blue. There are a bunch of guys that I had the whole “narcissism of small differences” thing with when I was growing up. They’re also “literary”, the kind of guy who would describe himself as a “wordsmith” or a “master persuader”…
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Can I anticipate what the conclusion to this piece is going to be? Going by my past experience, I will have a rough idea of what it might be, but when I actually finish the piece I will be slightly surprised by it. Or rather, I will pick something that I find slightly surprising, something that energizes and jolts me. That is the premise and the promise of volaic verses. And that is what I am looking for in my junkyard. I’m looking for animating spirit. The actual volume of junk isn’t all that important. Trying to decrease the volume of junk is a proxy pathway to what really matters. The most important thing
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one of my less critical projects is my instagram, which i don’t feel very strongly about. I could eliminate it entirely and start all over again from scratch and i would be quite okay with it. which makes it one of the easier things to examine with a dispassionate eye. I don’t really have a strong “brand” or “goal” or “vision” for my instagram. In the earliest days I was just posting pictures of my life – my home, my cats, a few travel pics. My computer setup. Commutes. I notice I have a habit of documenting hostile architecture
just archived something like 200 instagram posts (about 1/3rd of all posts) and i feel really good about it. ‘the best of sony for the best of you” shitty copywriting 2014. daily commute used to depress me. people crossing the road, #infrahell. babies taking selfies. two door problems.
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In 2018 I had a conversation with a writer friend where we discussed how in some ways the meta-problem of “everything” is that everything is fragmented, all over the place, messy, chaotic, unintelligble. Around that time I had begun to really get into the swing of my intertwingled twitter threads, and so it seemed obvious to me that the solution to the problem of fragmentation is just better threading. And I didn’t just mean “more twitter threads”, though that’s one way to approach some of it. I meant “thread” in a more abstract sense, almost symbolic or divine, like the thread Theseus used to make his way into and out of the labyrinth. I remember this conversation well particularly because I wrote a thread about it.
So in some sense I am always looking for this mythical, divine thread that weaves through all of my interests. Once you can put a bunch of seemingly disparate things into a thread, they no longer remain disparate. There is continuity through them. There are fewer things to remember. You just need to follow the thread. So I yearn for threads through my junkyard. I’ve been meaning to write a post about the threading thing but I don’t know if I can yet.
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Mess, 26aug2022
I’ve joked that I’m procrastinating but what feels like the truth to me deep down for me is that i’m working.
My life is a mess. When I say a sentence like that you can’t actually know what I mean by it, and chances are you’re going to pattern match it onto what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard. I think most people would interpret it to be a negative statement, because it’s typically said by people who are frustrated. But I honestly have come to mean it in a value-agnostic way. It’s just the truth of the situation.
Some people say it casually
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sitting on a lot of material, 4oct2022
I’ve been writing for about 20 years now, which is a moderately long time. I’ve logged at least a million words across my blogs and tweets and so on, and probably something closer to 2M words if we include texts and forum posts. I’ve written many different things in many different ways. And I’m always trying to find new ways to write.
I’m sitting on a lot of draft material. At some point – I think around 2015 or 2017 or so, I could look up the exact date if I wanted but I don’t really care to right now – I decided to do a great purge of sorts, deleting loads of posts from my blog. I regret it immensely. I should have archived it instead. There’s a non-zero chance that I actually might have the archive file buried deep somewhere, but I haven’t had the heart to go looking for it.
Anyway, here I am. Millions of words written. Thousands of blogposts. Hundreds of thousands of tweets. Hundreds of YouTube videos. Two books. Some of it useful to people. Most of it I’m very glad to have written. What now? What next?
I don’t want to be writer who spends too much time writing about writing. When reviewing @1000wordvomits, I found that I spent roughly somewhere between 6-8% of the time writing about writing – which I think is a fairly decent amount of time and energy to spend paying tribute to the craft. If it were 20% or more, I would find it tacky, overwrought. But I’m noticing that, as I write essays for this Substack, it seems like I’m going through a few layers – Voyagers was a bold dramatic gesture, Unpublished was me grumbling about my drafts, IDontWanna was me grumbling about myself, and now this is me grumbling about writing itself. Maybe I just need to get it out of my system. What next?
Perhaps afterwards I might introduce myself. Introducing yourself is a pretty challenging thing to do, especially to a vague and unknown audience. So it helps to be precise and pick out someone specific. I believe that one shouldn’t write for the audience one has, but for the audience one wants. I have been privileged to cultivate an audience that I’m quite fond of – lots of thoughtful, kind, interesting people. But while I am grateful, I am never satisfied. There’s always something greater to strive for.
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junykyard bankruptcy 23dec2018
Junkyard bankruptcy
I want to spend a vomit writing about… note junkyard bankruptcy
I’ve spent a lot of time over the weeks, months and years “cleaning out my notes”.
It’s a never-ending task. My notes are always being created faster than I can edit, update and manage them. I feel like I have too many things to look at. I find myself wishing for this beautiful imaginary state of perfection where everything is in its right place. But nothing ever is. I have too many pictures. I have too many notes. I don’t even really know where everything is, and what is where, let alone how I want to tidy things up. I need to change the way I’m thinking about all of this, because it is a losing game and I’m tired of playing a losing game. How do I start winning? How do I… konmari my digital life? I have too much stuff. It’s scary and overwhelming and frustrating. Where do I start. How do I begin. I don’t think it’s even possible for me to comprehend my entire body of notes and work, let alone wrap my head around it and make sense of it.
Okay, so there’s a clue. I can’t do everything. I have to do a little bit at a time. How do I start chunking? One folder at a time. I’m currently copying out my “Cupcake” hard drive onto my macbook, so I can delete the backup on the hard drive and start cleaning out the photos.
Fragmented feelings
A thing I’ve been talking about to a few people recently – I’ve been feeling fragmented.
I don’t think this fragmentation is new – I think it’s been how I’ve been for a long time, but I haven’t had the time and headspace and mood to really wrap my head around all of it. I have lots of projects going on at the same time, and make progress on them pretty slowly. I’m not as efficient as I’d hypothetically like to be.
It’s interesting to think about, and figuring this out is important to me because it has some very real consequences for me and my life.
How do I manage this immense junkyard that I’ve accumulated over the past few years? What do I do with it? As I type this vomit, I can see a collection of photos on my adjacent screen – I have over 80 pictures that I’ve assembled in an attempt to try and make sense of how my life has been turning out over the past few years. I’m trying to make sense of my personal history, the events that have shaped me. I’m trying to re-evaluate, re-examine the narrative of my life, and get a clear sense of where I am, who I am, where I’m going, who I want to be. I’d like to have something to show for it. “My life in pictures”. It feels like I’ve made some progress, like I’ve got a bit of a coherent picture, something to build off of. But… where do I go from here? Should I take a moment now to write a post with all these pictures? Or should I just… continue with this word vomit? Decisions like these plague me every day.
I think I’m going to quickly put together a blogpost and see what happens. Alright, I did it! Took a little longer than I intended, but it’s done. And it’s nice to know that it exists now, so that I have a reference point to work with. I can slot in more pictures, and I can write some thoughts and comments about what happened around those time(s).
That felt good. So what’s next? Next up is finishing this word vomit. And that means circling back to talking about fragmentation. What feels fragmented? I’m looking at my desktop. And my notes. And my evernote. And… everything is just everywhere. How do I “centralize” it? It should be… output. Output is all that *really* matters. If I’m reading things, it’s because I want it to inform my output.