My life is pretty good overall. I’m married to my best friend whom I’ve known for 25 years, and we have a beautiful baby boy. Creatively and professionally I’m living my dream, which is that I make a living writing about things that I want to write about. I’m friends with people that I respect and admire. I technically have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want– this has been temporarily constrained by the challenge of parenting a 1-year-old, but overall, the fundamentals are sound. I’m financially doing okay, and I can see a path to continually doing better. My younger selves would be thrilled to hear how I’m doing; many of them were genuinely concerned that I was not gonna make it altogether.

And yet, despite all of that, I feel a general unease, like there’s something missing, something that’s probably in plain sight that I’m not seeing. So I run through the usual checklist. It’s true that I’m not getting enough sleep, I’m not spending enough time with friends apart from my immediate family, I would probably benefit from more exercise, and I could manage my inspirations better. But these 4 things have always been true about me to varying degrees, so that doesn’t feel like the main thing. My sense is that there’s some bottleneck that I’m barely even perceiving correctly.

One thing that’s true is that I have a sprawling todo list that has maybe gotten out of control. As I write this, I notice that I have two different bookmarks to separate Google Docs in my bookmarks tab, one pointing to “todo” and another pointing to “Voltaic” (which is the temporary-and-therefore-probably-final name for my one-man publishing company). I recently learned that gdocs allows you to have multiple tabs on the same page, so I copy out the full text of Voltaic, and move it into a new tab in my todo doc. I delete the tab. And I feel a tiny relief. Alright. That’s good. I probably need to do several more things like this.

Here I clicked on an old bookmark to a document relating to a draft of a novel I’d written, and I went on a little rabbithole for a bit.

That was satisfying. I feel like I got some relief out of that. I could wrap up here, but let’s maybe try to keep going? (I did in fact wrap up here to go to bed, but it’s been a few days and I feel like I could continue from here.)