I miss putting my words out into the world. I even miss the (perhaps inevitable) performative aspect of it, where thought goes into the curation, the presentation, the aesthetic. It’s what I used to get from blogging, before blogging became (for me) stale, or what I used to get from Instagram, before that became about status, and the algorithm prioritized personality over art.
I blogged for years (7?), did the social media thing for a moment (facebook, briefly, as a teenager, then toyed with twitter, was a sporadic instagram user through a good portion of my 20’s). The newsletter I started when I quit social media ended up becoming purely a vehicle to announce ‘news’: career events or successes (poems published, play reading invitations). I wanted it to be different, but I no longer knew how to be online in a way that wasn’t about career, image, or efficiency.
Quitting social media and quitting my job happened within weeks of each other, and I had nearly a year of freedom from both, although I sometimes found myself lurking feeds of artists or thinkers I admired — missing their words, but not wanting to play on that particular playground anymore. From my quiet creative cave, I wrote, read, and created, mostly privately, except for when I shared a polished piece with a close few.
In this inward space, I dug tunnels for myself (who am I kidding, they’re whole-ass warrens) in different realms of idea and experience: in writing (literature, screenwriting, poetry), in spirituality (Tarot, astrology, human design, reiki), in psychology (behavior, trauma, emotional intelligence), in coercive/high control groups (religion, abuse, cults), politically (the ongoing culture wars, media manipulation, gender identity, bias, various ideologies).
With this exploration, I’ve thought about different ways of creating around each of these topics, which always sees them as separate (a column about religious trauma! a podcast about astrology! a webseries about dysmorphia!). And while I’ve enjoyed other Substacks that explore topics specifically (George Saunders’s Story Club, for example, or Grace Lidinsky-Smith’s Hormone Hangover), after surges of excited brainstorming, I get uninspired rather quickly when I limit myself to just one area of interest. It’s all in my head, anyway — I’m not sure where I got the idea that focusing on one thing, and one thing only, is how things had to be done (unless it’s the horrible marketing/internet-speak I’ve been immersed in for work the past several years, which hammers the idea of niches and branding to death). It wasn’t until I came across a Substack that eschewed that model completely, and felt the closest thing to a blog (the way I remember blogs, anyway, before they too became ways of having a “personal brand” and capitalizing on…whatever it was the writer wanted to parlay into income), that I realized perhaps the cure to my creator-slump was to try something different.
For the past however-many years (nearly a decade?), I’ve created for the sake of career, and I’ve created for my own sake (writing that will never see the light of day, and that was the point). But it’s been a while since I created in a way that allows me to express and share with some immediacy (no waiting on producers/editors/casting directors for a green light, here), and isn’t meant to stay squirreled away in a private journal, either.
I'm curious what it looks like to be in that in-between again: to write with the intention of sharing, but without the concern of monetizing or profiting or furthering a “goal” or agenda. No deliberate value adds here (good god, set me free from the world of content marketing). Instead, creation. Or, at least — an experiment.
By the end of my blog, I both resented the pieces of me I was leaking to the world, and simultaneously didn’t have any coherent boundaries around what was mine, and what was for sharing. Boundaries weren’t something I thought about (in any area of my life), or if I did, I took a sort of pride in my lack of them: nothing was off the table, I would bare everything, to be an artist was to be vulnerable and transparent! Of course, funnily enough, when I look back at the last dying legs of that blog, the posts are filled with confusion and misdirection, an attempt to hide parts of myself, to wriggle out of the kind of oversharing that had become my (and the internet’s) norm. I have a better understanding of myself, now, and what I prefer to be private about, and I’m not interested in this space becoming either a vacuum of vagueness or a depository of overindulgence, and will do my best to keep that in mind as I share.
If I think of the internet as a collective instead of a marketplace (which might not be the case, anymore, but whatever, we create our own reality, right?), what might I bring to the discussion? What might I want to? The best thing about the early days of the internet was how low the stakes felt. It was like a virtual devised theater troupe: let’s throw things at the wall, fall down a lot, see what sticks, and find the occasional magic. The best thing about a lot of my own early-life artistic endeavors was the low stakes. I don’t mean carelessness; I always showed up and threw all of myself into making something I cared about and could stand behind and wanted to share. It was simpler, though, and far less dysfunctional than what all this has turned into, at least for me.
I remain invested in philosophy, psychology, the exploration of our humanity through writing/art, and even the internet, because there’s so much complexity and juice here. The people and creativity I encounter, all the time, truly are an array, and boundless. There’s a whole sea teaming with opinion and belief and experience and point-of-view. That shit lights me up. And when I can engage with that, with them, with the world (even this one, existing in pixels), I find myself — continually, and unfailingly — fascinated.
Consider this an experiment in keeping that particular fire alive.