On Writing Every Day for 5 Months Part III
The presentation went well! People seemed to like it. People asked nice questions that I thought a lot about and that felt good to answer. I thought I should record it, but I forgot to and I don’t think the host did either. I think this is something that would have felt very special years into the future. I did say “um” an enormous amount of times. For some reason I find zoom presentations more nerve wracking than other kinds of presentations.
Somebody asked me what I was most proud of in this time block. I said that what I was most proud of involved the speaker himself! Which was an energetic exchange between the two of us about the power of strategy in times of despair, as an antidote to that despair.
Pieces of strategy that have been the most useful to me:
Having a container that you like, that makes you feel cozy and safe, where you put different things, like your ideas, where they get saved and undamaged that you trust, and know where to go to check when you need that type of object. Everybody knows that if there is a pen-holder in a house, the pen-holder seldom moves. It is kind of heavy and nobody ever has a real reason to move it. And everybody knows the disappointment of needing a pen, diligently going to the pen-holder, and noticing there are no pens. Or that there are many pens, but none of them work. These are the feelings that you are trying to avoid. You want to go to the pen-holder, see pens you like, take the pens you like, and feel good about the entire process. You want to reduce “pen-holder friction” where it is not necessary.
You want to follow the fun. The things that feel like they are fun, or that they feel like they are working, or that do not feel like work — that’s what you want to be doing more of. When it feels fun and joyful and unhinged and unfiltered and relaxing — these are good feelings! You want to be feeling that. This is important for anything long-term. Trust your own inner critic and your own inner project manager — trust they they will still be there even when you are not looking at them, and they will come out and say stuff to you when they feel like it. These are not particularly self-filtering or self-isolating parts of your psyche. They will come out and have meetings with you. Don’t feel like if they aren’t looking over your shoulder for a bit, that this means you are doing something wrong. Probably it means they trust you to do something right without supervision.
Some is better than none. Generally speaking, psyching yourself out and not doing the thing you said you wanted to do, because it feels like it will be so intense and so much fun and so interesting and so what you need to be doing, isn’t the right thing. You maybe shouldn’t do the thing — maybe there are good reasons you are having all those feelings. But maybe you should find some safe small version of the thing to do anyway, or do a safe thing that you already know is safe that you’d done before, rather than being anxious and doing nothing at all.