Everyone’s started a newsletter. That’s a fact. But I don’t want to start a newsletter, or a Patreon. I like a good old fashioned blog. A diarised version of my life, for the public to see, circa the 00s. The rule is they have to start with some kind of nauseating introduction, something self-reflective, a reason for existing. I guess all good companies and books and movies have something at their centre that drives them.
I think I’m doing this because putting something on the internet forces you to have accountability - at least, that’s the first thing they taught us in school when it came to computer literacy. The current British PM might prove otherwise. But all of us who write for others to see know this. Although when there’s so much information on the internet, I wonder whether what I write really matters at all. That’s another thing all writers worry about- at least, the ones who even have a hope of being good. Although maybe that’s not true. I’m sure there were many self-assured white men writing treatises by candlelight thinking they were the shit. And it’s presumptuous to think I know what makes a writer good, as if there is an objective good.
The trouble is that I can’t seem to find my voice. Or rather, I keep second-guessing it. Writing right now, I think of Carrie Bradshaw. I think of my friends writing newsletters that ping into my inbox on the same day each month. I think of the clever ways they frame their thoughts, how they have punny section headers and points of view. I could go tumblr blog, all teen earnestness. But even that rawness is contrived, now, and I hated reading Catcher in the Rye in high school exactly because of Holden Caulfield. And then I cringe at myself for referencing Catcher in the Rye at the big age of not-eighteen-anymore. It’s like the catch-22 of phoniness. Why is it that your intense dislike holds a mirror up to you? Why do you become a phony when you’re trying so hard not to be one? Why do I have to write in public at all? Because I have so little discipline that even writing one page - one page! - in the journal I’ve kept by my bed for months in the hope that one day I will simply look over and pick it up, and begin, just hasn’t happened.
Jacob Sam-La Rose told me that if musicians have to practice every day, why shouldn’t writers? I wholeheartedly admit that right now I feel rusty. And a little silly. A middle school teacher taught us to write lists of ideas when responding to a prompt, because your brain gets out all the dead leaves and ‘easy ideas’ and toward the bottom of your list there appear the supposed gems. But I’ve already stopped and started at least three times and I had to make the decision to stick with something and keep going.
Discipline is something I used to be familiar with. Now, I feel like I don’t even honour my own word to myself. A corporate lady came in one day to teach the BAMEs how to be leaders. She said we had to start by honouring our own words to ourselves. ‘If you say you’re going to get up to go exercise at 8am, you have to do it. Because otherwise, you’ll let yourself down. And you’ll be teaching yourself that you can’t trust yourself.’ Apparently you can re-draw the contract with yourself, but all that negotiating must take a toll too at some point.
Self-awareness is really fucking annoying. I have to start writing from somewhere, so I guess for now, I’ll have to write like a phony. Maybe that’s my word to myself - I’ll use adverbs when I should make the verb sing, I’ll start with ‘And’ all the time to sound breathless but that is how talk, I’ll write too many long sentences in a row and forget to break them up with short, punchy ones. And it will all be worth it because I WILL HAVE WRITTEN SOMETHING, HA, TAKE THAT, I TRICKED YOU INTO WRITING SOMETHING and at the bottom here is the Big Thing you learned! Like a fifth grade teacher who gets you to write sentences, then shows you that if you break up the lines it becomes a poem. And you get so excited by the magic trick that you keep doing it and doing it until you become an expert in sleight of pen. If you trick yourself into doing something, does that mean you’re also breaking your word to yourself?
There are words on this page, which is more than I had fifteen minutes ago. I don’t know if I feel any better for it, although the physical sensation of typing a big bloc of words always feels satisfying. Do people use Twitter as a tool to learn conciseness? I think I use it to learn how to be funny. I envy the people who are able to fire off two sentences that are so pithy and perfect that half a million people react. As you can see, I’m not able to do that. But maybe it’s because I’m enjoying this so much, and really, it doesn’t matter if you read it, because what really matters is that I put it out for you to see.
So I’m gonna…do what I want. That’s the modus operandi - no discipline here besides the discipline of putting words on a page. I don’t care about the ideal blog post length to make sure people read to the end, or catchy headers, or even a name. I might post twice a day. I might do a drunk post at 2 am - whey! I’m going to use more than my lifetime’s share of exclamation points, what the heck are you going to do about it? I don’t even mind if you don’t get all the way down here. I’m not gonna know. Unless you come at me for coming at you about exclamation points, and then making a bad joke about it.
I’ve tried to behavioural science myself into discipline. It’s not working, and I’ve come to the obvious and yet somehow-only-now-obvious-to-me point that I just don’t want to do the thing. Or, haven’t wanted to do the thing. Right now, I’m actually enjoying this. That’s how it always is, isn’t it, that you forget how good doing something you love feels and then you do it again after a long time and wonder, why did I stop doing this? Maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve to do it. Where did I develop that judgment, or maybe even the word is self-loathing? I forgot what it felt like to write, to shed the words and feel like I’m saying something, and it doesn’t really matter what, because I’m saying something. Maybe that’s a dangerous path. But maybe it’s one we all have to take when we’re writing, even in private. We feel like we have something to say, something worth enough to record. And in the records, maybe someone else will know us. Even if we say it’s just for us, but don’t say ‘burn my journals’ before we die. Although if you’re reading this and I’ve just died, please burn my journals. Or don’t, if you think they would mean something to you. And please don’t think I’m planning to die anytime soon - I like living very much, and I still have a lot I want to do. But as a concept, I’m almost 100% at ease with death when I think about it. My God is merciful and that’s really all there is to it.
I guess you can’t really talk about writing without talking about creation, and with creation there is always some form of life and death. I wrote that thinking ‘what a pretentious thing for a 26 year old to write and does that even mean anything’ but it’s satisfying to connect this little thing, these little words, with all of creation. Even on a simplistic level. I was watching a YouTube video about space with Gio on the couch and the narrator said that if the universe is infinite, every single thing you can imagine will happen. There’s no higher or lower in that, there’s no better or worse. Anything I write will have something ‘better’ than it, and ‘worse.’ And within that there’s no point in trying to see where you are in the rankings because it genuinely doesn’t matter anymore - there will always be an infinity of things you’re simply in between. That’s the space I’d like to write in.