“social mistake i used to make a lot was, always engaging with everyone the way I wanted to be engaged with, which was to be taken seriously in a very particular way. turns out a lot of people just* be saying shit**, without necessarily like, putting heavy significance*** about it”

I initially typed the above out as a tweet, but I quickly got the sense that it’s too complicated to manage. the second sentence in particular has paragraphs worth of caveats, and there are all these implications that I don’t particularly intend, and by the time I address all of that I will end up with a completely different set of words.

and then I found myself quickly thinking, wait, that’s a great sign that it should be an essay! and the moment I have THIS thought – “great sign it should be an essay”, another part of my mind sets off on a separate tangent of “ohhhh it’ll be so good to get into like, how some thoughts are better for tweeting and some thoughts are better for writing essays, and like the creative challenge of managing both at the same time…” and I started to get really tired.

the above 3 paragraphs are an interim state. the 3rd paragraph I might end up spinning off into a separate essay entirely. I have another essay in a different window that I initially started on today, and I’m currently negotiating with myself internally about whether I should go back and try and finish that one first, or if I should put that on pause and do this one.

this is a screenshot of my creative process. i am always working through things in my mind like this. layers upon layers. if you sometimes see me write something surprisingly clear, simple, useful, etc, that’s downstream of all of this wrangling. I suppose at some level it must be like how I find it astounding that illustrators are able to sketch a human face beautifully, or draw the scene of a street effortlessly. it’s because they’ve worked through all the wrong interpretations, all the wrong moves. once you understand that stuff and you brush it out of the way, you almost can’t help but do the right things.

all of this is a game that I am playing with myself. when I play it well, it is absolutely exhilarating.