How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Blog

A woman I love once told me that she makes little presents for her future self. This caught my attention. I imagined I could make tiny memory books, tied together in ribbons, print photos and put them into envelopes, fill up a notebook of scribbles from my friends at every party I attend. The point would be to put these in a box and not think about them very much, but then one year, two years, ten years later, these will be treasures from the world that reflect back to me meaningful moments of contact, crashes, fusion, burning together with reality and remind me of who I am.

This post is meant to be a little sweet note, probably, and also maybe one of those things I would like to read some day but would easily forget to write given its fragility in time. It is one of those posts that is easy to lose through distraction, doing something else, or just any shift in emotional state. I am happy that I have went ahead and typed up the idea for this post while I had the stamina, so that I can then go do other sorts of things and both the structure and the passion behind it has been preserved.

One piece of advice we had gotten more than once here at Inkhaven is that we should not be afraid to write what is obvious, and I am learning not to be insecure about too many posts about the writing process or about Inkhaven.

There are many people here who are writing about mathematics, but that is because they are thinking about mathematics. I am thinking about writing and about how to write in a way that is more vulnerable and closer to the heart. I am practicing how to write about my own personal experiences without so many layers between myself and the writing.

Another piece of advice we had gotten more than once from more than one person is that one way to get content is to run little experiments, on yourself or with a small group of people, and write it up. I’ve been told that this does count as real science, feel free to replicate little experiments you find interesting that you’ve read, and do not forget to write it up, because that is how it becomes science and not something just in your head forever. (I can credit Slime Mold Time Mold for some of this advice about experimentation, others like A and G I am not sure if they would want to be named here and so I will err on the side of not naming them!)

Inkhaven is its own unique experiment, and so people asking me about the experiment and what it was like feels very natural. (People have in fact been doing this already.)

There are things that I’m grateful for already, and things I am still hoping to get by the end of the 30 days.

I’m already grateful for a reconnection to the joy of blogging and writing and being creative. The pressure is high to write every day, but also it is not very high in terms of quality demands and there is not really a fear of making mistakes — which I believe was the point, to get the reps in without high levels of self-consciousness that prevent just going to the writing gym and getting your reps in.

Would I recommend something like this? Yes.

Would I run something like this in the future? Yes.

It is so cool to be creative with other people without pressure. What I love also is that they have elevated the concept of the blog post to its own art form, with its own habits of mind and its own habits of craft — qualities beyond that which can be analyzed simply by if it’s lucrative, or how many likes there are, or money earned, or subscribers — which so many coaching programs on writing have become. “How to make money quickly and quit your day job: Substack Edition.” But this is more about how to have a nice day, how to have nice days, how to hang out with people, how to have blogging be something you love and how to have it be part of your life if you love it, taught by people who love blogging and love reading blogs and love talking to bloggers. I can imagine it is like a Youtube conference (I’ve never been to one) in which people talk about the old days of Youtube and hang out making both long and short videos with each other to post, loving their medium.

It is also really is nice to be around so many people doing the same thing, such that blogging is not the wrong thing you are doing that is subversive in your time off, in little nooks and crannies of time between when you are supposed to be doing something important. This is the month and a rare one where blogging is the thing you are supposed to be doing and doing something else is the luxury. I am impressed that people who are still doing their job part time while they are here are still treating their blogs as their essential work.

I do think that the selection criteria of people and then the commitments required make it so that it really is possible for people to be doing this kind of stuff together in a way that feels socially sanctioned. And there is a healing thing in the social sanction — where the original idea of a blog was so that it’s for yourself and perhaps your friends, not something that would make you a ton of money in the early days of the internet, though those early pioneers did end up with often large amounts of success by showing up and being themselves. And there certainly is something healing in reconnecting with those early days, early joys, before the great flattening of internet content happened that allows greater freedom. The social support here allows a relinquishing of more current standards (money, followers) and a reconnection with these older standards (creativity, care, artistry of the form).

Because the social support is already here psychologically, there is more of an ethos of allowed risk taking, and that I think is really special indeed. Even though it is purely psychological (if some politician comes after you on the internet, it is not like you would have any more meaningful backup in that specific fight), but then the psychological backup is the psychological big fat mattress that this is something you may want, doing it feels like a gift, and so even without the backup you still feel good about doing it because it is fundamentally doing what you want to be doing on this earth — reconnecting with that basic need around doing anything at all. I think this is really important.

All of this is something that I have already gotten.

As for future plans…

I think a really fascinating outcome would be if this actually is like a rehab for me to learn how to wake up earlier.

Everything is here: snacks, some place to walk to, some things to do, people to do them with, not many other obligations, an amount of work that is structurally demanding, but not impossible.

It’s something I already started working on. By wake up early, I mean something like normal work times, such that getting to a 9 a.m. meeting doesn’t seem unfathomably terrifying, and such that I actually get a few hours of something done before lunchtime. And then I can have the hours of 8 p.m. to midnight all to myself—to have 4 hours of being mystical and do whatever I want, but doing them in the world, before I do them in my dreams, where nobody gets to see what I am up to.

This goal of waking up before 10:20am consistently has been a goal of mine for a decade at least, and I have tried many interventions. I will die some day, and “you can sleep when you are dead” isn’t motivating to somebody who likes sleeping, but it was my college motto and the motto of those around me, and it didn’t occur to me back then that I could put some of my colorful dreams into a colorful waking life. “You can sleep in your sleep and when you are dead, but dream in your life” may be a more appropriate affirmation for me in this phase in my life.

The other thing I am hoping for is to be more Chromatype Red, as per my Chromatype motivation typing system.

This “let’s feel the whole the world and feel it be very real and then die” is a real ethos I have, but I have been embarrassed by it and living it in very strained ways. I’ve been denying these parts of myself because it seems rather impractical and rather a little bit dramatic and extra. But I am already melodramatic whether I do anything interesting with feeling the universe or not, so I might as well let my freak flag fly, as the kids say, and use my derangement to actually get something like, if not work output as work output, but maybe something like living life the way I imagine a life can be lived on earth and try to do something vaguely like what I imagine it to be.

With these two goals in mind, my writing process now has been to clank out a few pieces or parts of pieces on the typewriter after I wake up, and then it won’t be clear to me until the late afternoon and early evening which piece I want to be editing to get to the point where I can post it that day.

I don’t have any heuristics about which blog posts to write, other than the advice from the special writers here to help us who are fancy and have done this for a decade plus, say that the blog posts that feel itchy, that just keep coming up and bothering them, are the ones that get written. There are not really bad ideas, just ideas that do not get written. There are enough ideas in the queue such that some will always be left out, because the pace of idea generation is so much faster than the pace of execution, and this should not be seen as a failure; my own heuristic has been to write blog posts that either I just feel like writing that particular day or that feel particularly fragile—like, if I don’t write it now, in a fit of passion of some sort, it will never get written because the passion will just vanish and will be very challenging to ever regenerate. That, combined with the size of the piece, my energy levels for editing, and if it conflicts with what I feel like thinking about that day determine what I end up typing up and publishing that day. But in those situations, I would try to write both to harness the energy I have and write out some of a piece, even if I don’t get to editing it. (Today’s piece for example was going to be something completely unrelated to this, but writing this and editing this was what I had energy for since it is what was already cached in my attention from answering texts about Inkhaven.)

And many people really are not quite good at noticing what is interesting to other people (I thought this was just me for a while, but from talking to people here, lots of people are not great at noticing what is unique about their experiences or experiments over the course of their lives that other people have never gotten to read about before). Sometimes it is really just simple things or simple activities or simple parts of life that people enjoy reading about, and not necessarily something overly complicated. Actually, I would not even trust myself at this point to really know what is complicated and what is not so complicated.

But it is not clear at all which blog post will be my most popular. Seeing the Substack metrics really does verify for me that I really, truly do not know and truly am not having a better model of knowing from the data I have, so I cannot use it to guide my work yet.

And so that’s how I stopped worrying and started to love my blog.

As per my hypothesis entering the program to write at least 500 words every day for a month, I haven’t been having any issues meeting word count, as I continue writing with my style of writing that I applied with specifically in my writing samples. With this style of writing, I write because I always have something to say — not because of any confidence it is worth anyone’s time to read or have beliefs that it will change people’s mind about anything, but because I have a drive to share things as a personality disposition, in the way that some people have a disposition to sing, or some people have a disposition to express themselves through rapping, or some people have a disposition through carving up wood, or some people have a disposition to throw money at strippers. It is a way of putting putting themselves out there and into the world. This way happens to be mine, at least for now.

I’m already grateful to Inkhaven for caring enough about this thing that we feel like we can care about it at least as much as they do and take it a little bit more seriously, not just for the positive global effect it might have on others based on my vision of a theory of change in the world that the blog is a part of, but in seeing both the blog as an artistic object and myself as an artist with the corresponding permissions that artists get to do their work with their processes of flow and tension and release that make artists actually sane enough over time to do what they want to be doing and living their artistic life. And to that I am already very deeply grateful.