I'm Not Sure

Uncertainty is real. Uncertainty is important. Uncertainty is profoundly, overwhelmingly frustrating. And for me, it's home.

I haven’t written anything, really written anything, in a long time. I’m scared.

I know that some things I wrote became important to some people. I’m afraid of tarnishing those things by association with stuff that’s empty, faltering, circular, lost, droning static or grotesque splatters.

I know that I put a lot of thought and effort into writing some things, but that the voice that I use there isn’t the voice that I use all the time. It isn’t me-at-my-most-me, it’s me trying very hard to accomplish very particular goals using words and language that are not the words and language I would fall into if I wasn’t trying to steer anything.

I know that, moment to moment, I’m kind of an idiot. I’m impulsive and distractible. I have pretty much all the symptoms you’d expect of someone with severe ADHD. It’s often hard for me to interact with people, but I always crave attention. I perform tasks in glacially frustrating slogs punctuated by bursts of hyperfocused obsession, growing increasingly furious at myself for creating an ever greater chasm between what I can imagine and what I actually accomplish.

It’s that chasm I fear most when contemplating a new project. Knowing that the moment I start I will be falling short of what I really want to do, and dreading that I will only fall further and further behind as I go, until frustration calcifies into resentment, avoidance, shame, and abandonment.

And that is why, at 3:00 am as I found myself finally trying to write something of substance, without a plan, without an end goal in mind, this is what came out. The slurry of simmering anxiety and fears that I’ve too often given myself over to manifested, token by token, here. But that’s one of the nice things about text - ideas are alive, they are slippery, they are reactive, and they do not hold still in a living mind. But fixed into text, like a photograph of the monster - the words have to fend for themselves. It’s a much less fair fight. Which I’m completely okay with.

Oh, another thing I’m scared of is that I’ll come off as really pretentious. Or obnoxiously meta. Or as someone who doesn’t understand the rule of threes.

It’s very difficult for anyone to “be themselves”. Everyone cares about things. Everyone wants certain things to happen. And it’s just about impossible to not let those drives influence how we act, in ways big and small. I think that’s why, when given as advice to the socially anxious, “be yourself” isn’t helpful. It’s easy to fall into default, instinctual patterns when you’re confident that that pattern will result in good outcomes for you. But if you think your default patterns won’t go over well, of course you’ll be reluctant stop overthinking of every possible detail and reaction and adjusting your behaviors in a desperate effort to make things be okay. So it’s true that people who feel comfortable being themselves generally are okay - but the causation runs the other way around. Confidence is a symptom of possessing effective default patterns, but confidence won’t produce them any more than blowing into a tissue will induce a cold.

This really went off on a tangent, and I’ll probably peel it off into another post because I don’t think it fits what I’m trying to do here very well. But I’m glad I wrote it.

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It’s several days later. I’m leaving it. I’m never going to publish again if I delete everything that I’m not happy with. I need to push through it and get used to having written things that I think have major problems. It’s the only way I’m going to get in practice, the only way I’m going to get out of my own head, the only way I’m going to turn a pile of rough ideas and unpolished prose into things anyone reads is to publish it.

And hey, I’m giving my future self a pretty easy bar to clear here.