Yelling into the void

Some personal updates

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

It’s time for my annual rant about trying to write in the age of slop and content. Did you guys miss this? I didn’t. Here goes:

Try as I might to maintain the consistency and speed required to be a successful writer in the attention economy, I do not think I can do it.

I think I’m not interested enough in producing content to reliably do it on schedule. I care less about putting something out than I do about what I put out, and that means, I have to follow a different rhythm.

I have times when I can be extremely productive, when it feels like the things I want to say are bursting forth from me like they’ve been piled up against the door of a closet and now that I’ve opened the door they just all come spilling out and I can’t get the words out fast enough.

And then there are other times when the pipe feels blocked or bone dry. I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve realized, as I’ve realized so many times before, that trying to keep to any sort of schedule is making it impossible for me to really write.

I felt a fire hose turn on inside me about a month and a half ago. In the past six weeks I have produced an enormous amount of content, most of which has not been ready for public consumption. A lot of it has not been essays, it’s been white paper drafts, organizing guides, video scripts, outlines of novels. I feel like I’ve laid about two dozen eggs, only a very few of which are anywhere close to hatching.

I’ve also done an enormous amount of personal healing in the past couple of months. It’s been a near-constant barrage of downloads and epiphanies, visceral sensations of old coping mechanisms and automatic patterns shedding, feedback loops disrupting, and healthier, more conscious choices taking their place. I feel like I’ve been clinging onto a jet ski through incredibly choppy waters, just barely, and sometimes the waves are strong enough to buck me off and I find myself thrashing about in the water, gasping for air, until I slowly climb back on and then we take off at full-speed again.

You guys, I am not fucking around. The past several months have been ungodly intense.