2026feb27– funnily i’m currently updating this while avoiding harder and more important posts– the creative discomfort doc, and the ‘X things i tell my clients’ post…

2025sep4 – For several years now I’ve been trapped in a psychic prison largely of my own making. We could start by calling it ‘perfectionism’, though I’ve come to think that that’s one of those stale words that maybe obscures more than it reveals. The underlying truth seems to be that, as I’ve grown older and I’ve grown in “prominence” (more people know me, more people follow me, more people have expectations of me), I’ve gotten more afraid of making mistakes. And as a result I’ve become more ‘flinchy’, more ‘twitchy’, less limber, less playful, more solemn and severe. I’ve pressured myself to become more “mature”, to pursue “greater success”. I feel more pressure to make more money to provide for my family. All of these pressures and expectations have done very little to help me make any sort of actual progress towards my goals, and in fact I think they’ve quite straightforwardly made me worse at it all. I know this isn’t entirely true, but I feel like I was more effective in the past. I suddenly find myself relating to Robert Baratheon: Gods, I was strong then! … but I do wonder if I’m just moping right now, in an a way that’s making me clunky and blundersome in my assessments. Because I was definitely also nervous, anxious, insecure when I was younger. But I was hungrier, perhaps. Maybe my desperation to “prove myself” and to “become somebody” overrode my weaknesses. And I was an underdog with nothing to lose.

I remember working on my second book was so much more daunting than my first. With the first book, it’s good enough if you get it out at all. With the second book, I felt like the stakes were higher– if I don’t demonstrate that I’m on a trajectory of growing as an author, then I’m either stagnating or ‘falling off’. So I put a lot more work into it, spent much more time on it, stressed myself out way harder about it, and I produced a better book, both by my own standards and by most of my readers. (Though some people prefer the first book for its breezier quality, which is also totally valid.)

But the treadmill just gets faster and the incline just gets steeper. I barely let myself appreciate or enjoy my personal triumph for more than a couple of weeks before I found myself “back in the grind” and not in a good way. Funnily, I warn about this a lot in Introspect…

/abandoned