guilt > hunger > desk > messes >
I have 48 ‘live’ drafts on my substack account, and I have the equivalent of about 200-300 more across my notes elsewhere. It’s gotten to the point where it feels quite absurd. I think I used to take a certain slightly-perverse pride in having a large volume of unfinished drafts, as a sign that I’m really serious about what I’m doing. But in this moment I don’t feel any pride at all. I feel tired, I feel stretched, I seek relief, I seek absolution.
In The Long Voyage, Charles Dickens wrote of an anguished voyager: “…there were many, many things he had neglected. Little matters while he was at home and surrounded by them, but things of mighty moment when he was at an immeasurable distance. There were many many blessings he had inadequately felt, there was love that he had but poorly returned, there was friendship that he had too lightly prized: there were a million kind words that he might have spoken, a million kind looks that he might have given, uncountable slight easy deeds in which he might have been most truly great and good. O for a day (he would exclaim), for but one day to make amends! But the sun never shone upon that happy day, and out of his remote captivity he never came.”
When I read this I had to pause and stare into space for awhile. Is this the human condition for everyone? Are some of us more burdened by this than others? I am in many respects far less tormented than I was in the past. But the better my life gets, the more I feel compelled to do more for others, and the more guilt I seem to feel at not having done more already. The question that slices this Gordian knot open for me is, “does the guilt even actually help you do better for others?” And the answer that rings out clearly, as if a great bell of stirling bronze were struck deep my heart, is a resounding NO. And as I write this, even though I’ve been here before, I have to sit back and feel out what is happening.
/archives/fasting
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I had a moment last night when I did this at my desk (evaluate my situation), and the first thought I had was “obviously I should clean up my desk,” and the second thought was “nah that’s so much work though,” and the third thought was “let’s do a little bit of it for funsies anyway?” — and within a couple of minutes I had a mostly-clean desk and substantially more peace of mind. Which reminds me: people often disagree about the relationship between a messy workplace and a productive mind. I actually think it’s quite possible to have a coherent model where everybody’s perspective can fit.
- there are different stages of work which benefit from different sensory environments. I noticed these differences within my own process when working on my last book: early stage drafting felt like a noisy, messy mining process best done with Led Zeppelin blasting on the speakers. Final stage editing felt like intricate jewel-setting work, best done in a quiet clean room in something like a hazmat suit.
- there are productive messes and unproductive messes. the difference i think boils down to something like clarity of intentions. a useful mess is one where you at least roughly know where everything is, and the presence of different elements has a cross-pollination effect. I almost said “cross-contamination”, which is an interesting ‘negative affect’ version of the thing.
Since we’ve looped back around, let’s get back to thinking and talking about messes. As I said, I have 48 drafts on my substack. I don’t think it would be wise for me to try and reread all of them right now in this relatively narrow window of opportunity I hae to get something done. But I do know that I have at least a couple of posts about messes and clutter, and maybe it would be worth revisiting those? So I’ll do that now:
// the trick is not minding that it hurts
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« ARRANGEMENTS: I’ve been thinking a lot about arrangement recently. the arrangement of objects, of ideas, of anything. when I used to work in content marketing, a fond memory I have is of how me and a colleague would collaborate to create infographics (which were really popular around 2013-2015 or so). We were determined to make good ones. One of the ways we would do this is look for good extensive lists of quotes on some topic, and then I would spend some time sorting the quotes into categories. So something like “how to do blog promotion” might have 30+ quotes, and I would try to assemble them into about 7 main themes. Then I’d try to organize the themes to have a coherent narrative from start to finish. I similarly enjoyed this work when working on my book Introspect, where I tried to synthesize everything I’ve ever read and learned in the self-help genre, isolating what I’ve found personally helpful, and then assembling them into a coherent narrative.
In the past 2 years or so since shipping Introspect, I’ve felt rather unmoored, listless, fragmented. I’ve come up with hundreds of fragments of drafts, but I’ve not yet found an organizing principle that’s really satisfying to me. I believe that when I do, I will suddenly seem much more productive as a writer, publishing at a much higher cadence than I’ve managed these past 2 years. I’ve had fleeting glimpses of some visions which have not yet manifested. I trust that it’ll happen eventually, but I’ve been getting increasingly flustered at not feeling much sense of progress. It’s hard to really know which internal reports are correct and which are misunderstandings or wishful thinking.
I have a bunch of different ideas about what approaches I could take in order to try to solve this puzzle. Restated, the puzzle is: I’m trying to find a way to rearrange my stuff in a way that feels resonant. One idea that was funny and appealing to me recently was to do an “all-hands meeting” with myself. »
« RELIEF: (condense into 2 sentences?) I’ve been conflicted and knotted about many things in many ways for some time now, which makes it difficult for me to get very much done. Most of my efforts go towards caring for my child. I have been playing a lot of Witcher 3 while he naps on me. A part of me would like to write something nice and comprehensive about the game, but I can’t seem to muster the energy for it.
I don’t want this substack to be about the interior experience of my creative struggles all the time. There are other things I want to write about. But I find it challenging to go on some of my nerdposting expeditions when I feel like some of my basic needs aren’t met. If someone needed to pee really badly, it doesn’t make much sense to ask “bigger” questions like…»