Original thread here.

I loved reading, all my life. Books gave me an interiority; entire multiverses within myself that no authority could take from me. They kept me sane in a truer and more timeless sense than the popular, superficial, faddish conceptions of “realistic” that I was bombarded with IRL.

I wrote casually throughout my teens. It didn’t feel like a conscious choice at first. It felt like breathing. I love words, and so I inhale them, and they swirl around the vortex of my being, enriching and nourishing me, and then I exhale them. Been doing this for decades now.

When I was about 19, I grew conscious of the fact that this was something that I was increasingly specialised in, something I truly loved, something I’m good at, something I wanted to get better at all my life. So I committed myself to writing and publishing One Million Words.

Someone recently asked me, why did you do it? what was your motivation? and the interesting thing here is that I couldn’t entirely articulate my motivation when I started. simplistically, I knew I loved words, and I wanted to become a better writer, and that *was* enough for me.

But I got out of bed to pace my living room at 620am because I feel like some of that has just revealed itself to me. And I’m sure I’ve kinda-sorta written about this before – you can append this caveat to everything I write – I’ve always written some version of it before…

Writing is a way for me to figure myself out. And I mean something very precise by that. I experiment with hundreds of thousands of phrases to find a handful of what we’ll call Words Of Power – phrases that have searing resonance with my entire being. This resonance is everything: it’s intellectual, it’s psychological, it’s emotional. It animates me. Literally, it wakes me from my sleep and has me pacing the house with a manic intensity while the world around me is in a dark and silent slumber.

I can spend hours ruminating on a single word, studying its history, learning about where it’s from, where it’s been, breaking down its components, teasing out its subtler connotations. The spirit of words is revealed to me, as a painter sees light, as a musician hears sound.

I’ve spent the last 3 years working on a book. It’s the best and most potent thing I’ve ever written. It’s also not nearly as good as I think it could be. Parts of it feel dead and opaque to me relative to what I feel in my heart, see in my mind. Nevertheless, I am proud of it. The book is my clunky attempt to share the spirit magic of words with others, and in my assessment, it’s… a decent enough attempt. But the book itself is not nearly as important as the internal transformation I have gone through in order to bring it to life.

To turn into a 🦋, a 🐛 must first go through a process of disintegration.  It forms a protective cocoon to do this in, and then it actually digests itself. To this I say: Big Mood. I turned up my attention on itself, then turned it up to 11, and the result has been cataclysmic.

I still haven’t said what I got up to say 😂 felt compelled to do all this poetic setup. The thing I want to say is the the Words Of Power allow me to cleave my reality at the joints. They allow me to manipulate the Matrix of my psyche. They allow me to channel my emotions. What I knew but couldn’t articulate when I started, is that in words I would find the magic I needed to set myself free. And the fact that I can articulate it now is itself part of the proof. I am a surfer of the chaotic utterances of the megamind.

(jul2018: My goal in life is to be a word artist-magician. Words are proxies for thoughts, and a master manipulator of words is a skilled navigator in the tumultuous ocean of meaning. Moana, but the ocean is the mind of humanity)

When it comes to words, I am a tuning fork, I am a chiropractor, I am a songstress, I am a priest. I birth worlds, I lead armies, I entertain children, I heal the sick. I am life and I am death and I am all of creation echoing through eternity through this singular moment.

(oct 2019: I am never truly alone, for I have the light of human consciousness pulsing through my nerves. I am a verse in a song that echoes through millennia. I am Feynman and Archimedes, I am laughter and joy, curiosity and awe, discovery and delight… anyway, support your local library)

And I have barely gotten started. 5 years from now, I will laugh heartily at how clunky and inelegant my writing here is. And 50 years from now I will be something I cannot even begin to conceive. It is a strange and terrible and beautiful and glorious thing, to feel this resonance through space and time, through the power of the word. When I quiet myself and really listen, I can hear the world rearranging itself around words of power. It already is. Always has been.

✱

“i have strong feelings about words” twitter thread