Day 21

Some sections in this essay are set apart. It all make sense in the end.

---

I’m three weeks into Inkhavenan appropriate time to retrospect.

It’s been good, and bad.

The bad is that I’m missing everything: the socialization, the workshops with writers, the events. I’m stressed out until I push my post for the day—I’ll get expelled if I don’t. I usually managed to do it by 6PM but, by then, events are over and people are gearing up to write. Some start writing as late as 11PM. Built different.

Being built the way I am has snagged my plans: I had imagined writing until 1PM each day, with the rest free to hang with friends. It hasn’t happened that way.

Jet lag totally wrecked me. It’s why I felt bad. Today I left the campus where we’re staying because they’re hosting an AI consciousness conference there. Everything just feels backwards.

Having said that, I have grown as a writer.

The little feedback I’ve gotten has been helpful, even though I didn’t follow any of it. But in explaining to myself why I chose not to, I articulated models of writing I didn’t even know I had.

Ok, it’s not true I didn’t follow ‘any of it’. I half-followed one of the two I got. I had a title, they suggested something else, I didn’t like because it was self-deprecating. But Substack has A/B tests now (“half-followed”, get it?) so I gave it a shot. Turns out mine did better anyway, good on me for only selling half my soul.

I’ve also gotten a better model of what makes writing difficult.

Why Writing is Difficult. 

Writing, real writing, demands rare honesty. Good writing flows from what’s alive right now, but whatever was alive yesterday might be dead today. 

That’s true even when the dead draft is nearly done. It’s tempting to push it to completion, but it's just self-betrayal. (And other-betrayal, if you publish.)

Another way of saying the same thing: writing is hard because honesty is hard. It takes guts to bleed onto the page each day.

Or, said a third way, improving at writing is indistinct from becoming who you are.

This model was hard-earned, coming after 16 days of dishonesty.

I like the ideas I shared in those first 16 days but, looking back—how I wrote about the same thing at the same time on the same place, every. single. day—it’s hard not to think I was just coping with jet lag by putting my head down and working on something that was growing increasingly emotionally stale.

It wasn’t the first time I had trouble holding seriousness and aliveness together.

In the past I’ve written fashion magazine style reports about Serious Events—which energized me greatly, but also embarrassed me so much I ended up unpublishing.

I worried: the concepts and ideas being shared at these events are weird enough. Am I doing anyone any favors by writing about them in this style?

But, truth is, the only thing that twisting my energy and my interests apart for so many days got me is that it broke me. The sheer volume of writing made it unsustainable.

I mean, just yesterday I was telling my gf I was having lots of feelings about America and that I needed to process them somehow. At which point it hit me: why not write about them?

And it’s like… how disconnected must I have been from my own experience that the thought of writing about it on a writing residency hit me like a bolt, instead of as the most obvious idea in the world.

Despite missing most events, I did overhear a little bit of advice here and there. Most of it was about how to succeed as a writer in the existing landscape. Nothing could interest me less: I want to dynamite mountains.

There was one exception though. Someone quoted Edmund Snow Carpenter, saying: “Artists don’t address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.”

This got my heart going—Yes! I want to write for myself and for God, others get to listen in.

The most personal is the most shared.

Have you noticed how the experiences you feel most afraid to share—the ones that feel too weird, too specific for anyone else to relate to—end up being exactly the ones people relate to the hardest? What gives!?

Each experience is made of different patterns, from the most basic (hot/cold, pleasant/unpleasant) to the most complex (contradictory, bittersweet). The more patterns a particular experience is made of, the more unique it feels. But that also means the more handles it has for others to relate to. Maybe no one relates to the whole thing, but many people will relate to several parts of it. 

Though, I disagree with Edmund on significance being what matters. I don’t think it is. I think what matters is resonance, and that resonance comes from being honest.

Which is bottlenecked by courage.

Nature loves courage. 

I quit my job in early 2018. I lost my co-workers, my friends, my source of income. I had to move back in with my parents. 

At my parent’s place, I was scouted by a startup incubator. Again: no source of income. I declined. It felt off. I spent the next years shitposting on Twitter instead. 

That shitposting led to everything good that has happened in my life since. 

As if that weren’t enough, LLMs now exist that can turn those 115k shitposts into something. 

Nature loves courage.

I wasn’t courageous those 16 days.

And I haven’t been with writing. I’ve been Serious instead of serious, sharing “atomic updates” instead of uplifting souls.

I’ve been trying to get to the heart through the mind. Enough—it’s time to go direct.

---

P.S.: Re-read the warning at the top, but now with the previous sentence in mind.