Sometimes I find posts that feel like the mirrors I look into are actually, intently, looking back at me - this post felt like that. I share so much of the sentiments of chaos and unstructured flow to the way I write, it’s remarkable how we are even able to put things out for people to read. And people actually read them! And comment too!
I recently wrote a piece on the algorithm inside my head that dictates who I write for, and it’s similar to your note on writing for everyone and yourself. As I read your piece I also thought of adding one more parameter to that: the future. I’d say I (we) also write for the future, such that it’s a chronology of personal growth and overcoming some form of imposter syndrome.
Don’t know how I stumbled on this but I loved it and I felt loads of weird feelings reading it and now even more weird feelings leaving a comment.
What I think I found most beautiful (besides the quality of your prose) is how open and honest you are about your weirdness and how that invites whoever is reading to feel comfortable in their own flavour of weird too?
It felt like I was getting deep access to the unflattering parts of ourselves we tend to hide, but my natural instinct to cringe didn’t kick in, I just felt endeared and appreciative of you for sharing.
Anyway, thank you. I’ll be sure to check out your other pieces.
Congratulations, you're about to get hit by a very long comment!
I have no authority to decide what is good or bad, but given the number of iconic authors (not the entertaining soup created to make the tanning boresome less painful) I've read in my life, fuck it, let's just decide I know a thing or two. Now we've got my credentials covered, I can state that you are criminally underread.
It's a mystery to me why your Substack would fly under the radar for so long. Sorely unfair. Maybe that thought that you never wanted to be a writer is still planted in you, but regardless, it seems that writing chose you and you don't have much of a choice to oblige, like there is absolutely no way you can escape your talent. It's just there. It's breathing for you.
I am browsing Substack a lot, looking for something that is not a diary of doomers distilling poisoned pain, cringing tears no one knows what to do with but wrap it in a newsletter, gifting the pain away "Hey, let's be miserable together, we'll feel less lonely" - co-miserability is not a cure. I am mentioning that because stumbling upon your reading is a rare thing in that overflooded scene. But also I see you coming: your rant is entirely different. It has both perspective and anchoring, being simultaneously universal and just you, infused with a generosity that has nothing to do with leaked feelings. I'd even say it's care. A meticulous dissection of being alive. In all, enrobed with a talent that can't be chewed from the corner of a phone app but devoured in the softness of stacked paper. Not in one sitting, more like a whole fridge, or even a purse-size supermarket you carry around everywhere you go with the reassurance that you'll never be hungry.
Like that comment you mentioned: everything we need.
I had to sigh, and softly smile, before I could find a response for this.
I feel… I don’t know
In a way I wish there was some… some… thing, someone, anything!, that could caress the debilitation which is my writing. But writing doesn’t even do it. It mutates into a new creation with every attempt to silence, always growing, a beautiful treacherous virus. I don’t know if it is my mind, or some universal one like I talk about in the post, or if I have control over any of this besides the gentle release of my desire to someone during it all.
I work, tired, to ensure I am not a siren for misery, to not be another scream of desperation that feeds the disease, to see a shimmer of hope in the peaceful faces of those who will never be seen. I know that is the sentence for some of us, that some of us toil in the sewers our whole lives. I don’t know if I am one of those, or if I am being too dramatic when in reality I have a beautiful life where I can visit the clouds and the trees and be there for people who care. I do know that agonizing in a stench ridden tunnel amidst the many who shovel shit for everyone else is a defeating task, a reverberation of the despair that keeps so many underground. But laying down in the trickle of muck would only add to the clog of a pipeline that could be a channel for joy.
I don’t know if it matters that my words are seen by many, but I do know it hurts to make things in a vacuum of response, and it harms the creative flow to show artists that their worth is tied to reactivity. There’s a test of strength there, in the simultaneous empty rejection and rewarded debauchery. But it’s exhausting always working to become strong.
It’s freeing to not push creation into the world, to simply scribble for scribbling’s sake. But I do wonder if my words are worth something to someone, so I tolerate the chains of exposing my experience.
I tell myself in a mantra of desperate disbelief that I do not need recognition, but the poison of worldliness seeps into everything I do, and sometimes I am too tired to stop the thoughts of me me need from infecting creations. Maybe that very thing is part of the source which supports my expression, but it is all so impossible to know.
I don’t know what I will write next, or if I’ll stop for a while, but I’m gonna finish what I started. I think that’s important, even if just for my own sanity.
Of course it matters that your work gets seen, that you get blessed from the echo of your words showing all the impacts they made. Powerful bullets of honesty in a world that digest too much. There is nothing as being too dramatic, drama is a plate served full we have to cut in pieces, chew and swallow on our own like still functioning humans.
Sometimes I find posts that feel like the mirrors I look into are actually, intently, looking back at me - this post felt like that. I share so much of the sentiments of chaos and unstructured flow to the way I write, it’s remarkable how we are even able to put things out for people to read. And people actually read them! And comment too!
I recently wrote a piece on the algorithm inside my head that dictates who I write for, and it’s similar to your note on writing for everyone and yourself. As I read your piece I also thought of adding one more parameter to that: the future. I’d say I (we) also write for the future, such that it’s a chronology of personal growth and overcoming some form of imposter syndrome.
Oh man, you’re already taking words out of the draft that is my next post. This is wild…
It’s like you’re stealing/sharing/idk the future, somehow knowing without knowing it.
Don’t know how I stumbled on this but I loved it and I felt loads of weird feelings reading it and now even more weird feelings leaving a comment.
What I think I found most beautiful (besides the quality of your prose) is how open and honest you are about your weirdness and how that invites whoever is reading to feel comfortable in their own flavour of weird too?
It felt like I was getting deep access to the unflattering parts of ourselves we tend to hide, but my natural instinct to cringe didn’t kick in, I just felt endeared and appreciative of you for sharing.
Anyway, thank you. I’ll be sure to check out your other pieces.
Congratulations, you're about to get hit by a very long comment!
I have no authority to decide what is good or bad, but given the number of iconic authors (not the entertaining soup created to make the tanning boresome less painful) I've read in my life, fuck it, let's just decide I know a thing or two. Now we've got my credentials covered, I can state that you are criminally underread.
It's a mystery to me why your Substack would fly under the radar for so long. Sorely unfair. Maybe that thought that you never wanted to be a writer is still planted in you, but regardless, it seems that writing chose you and you don't have much of a choice to oblige, like there is absolutely no way you can escape your talent. It's just there. It's breathing for you.
I am browsing Substack a lot, looking for something that is not a diary of doomers distilling poisoned pain, cringing tears no one knows what to do with but wrap it in a newsletter, gifting the pain away "Hey, let's be miserable together, we'll feel less lonely" - co-miserability is not a cure. I am mentioning that because stumbling upon your reading is a rare thing in that overflooded scene. But also I see you coming: your rant is entirely different. It has both perspective and anchoring, being simultaneously universal and just you, infused with a generosity that has nothing to do with leaked feelings. I'd even say it's care. A meticulous dissection of being alive. In all, enrobed with a talent that can't be chewed from the corner of a phone app but devoured in the softness of stacked paper. Not in one sitting, more like a whole fridge, or even a purse-size supermarket you carry around everywhere you go with the reassurance that you'll never be hungry.
Like that comment you mentioned: everything we need.
I had to sigh, and softly smile, before I could find a response for this.
I feel… I don’t know
In a way I wish there was some… some… thing, someone, anything!, that could caress the debilitation which is my writing. But writing doesn’t even do it. It mutates into a new creation with every attempt to silence, always growing, a beautiful treacherous virus. I don’t know if it is my mind, or some universal one like I talk about in the post, or if I have control over any of this besides the gentle release of my desire to someone during it all.
I work, tired, to ensure I am not a siren for misery, to not be another scream of desperation that feeds the disease, to see a shimmer of hope in the peaceful faces of those who will never be seen. I know that is the sentence for some of us, that some of us toil in the sewers our whole lives. I don’t know if I am one of those, or if I am being too dramatic when in reality I have a beautiful life where I can visit the clouds and the trees and be there for people who care. I do know that agonizing in a stench ridden tunnel amidst the many who shovel shit for everyone else is a defeating task, a reverberation of the despair that keeps so many underground. But laying down in the trickle of muck would only add to the clog of a pipeline that could be a channel for joy.
I don’t know if it matters that my words are seen by many, but I do know it hurts to make things in a vacuum of response, and it harms the creative flow to show artists that their worth is tied to reactivity. There’s a test of strength there, in the simultaneous empty rejection and rewarded debauchery. But it’s exhausting always working to become strong.
It’s freeing to not push creation into the world, to simply scribble for scribbling’s sake. But I do wonder if my words are worth something to someone, so I tolerate the chains of exposing my experience.
I tell myself in a mantra of desperate disbelief that I do not need recognition, but the poison of worldliness seeps into everything I do, and sometimes I am too tired to stop the thoughts of me me need from infecting creations. Maybe that very thing is part of the source which supports my expression, but it is all so impossible to know.
I don’t know what I will write next, or if I’ll stop for a while, but I’m gonna finish what I started. I think that’s important, even if just for my own sanity.
Of course it matters that your work gets seen, that you get blessed from the echo of your words showing all the impacts they made. Powerful bullets of honesty in a world that digest too much. There is nothing as being too dramatic, drama is a plate served full we have to cut in pieces, chew and swallow on our own like still functioning humans.
never finished
Making this one a poster for my wall. Think I’ll paste it over my useless college degree