guilt > hunger > desk > messes ><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have 48 \u2018live\u2019 drafts on my substack account, and I have the equivalent of about 200-300 more across my notes elsewhere. It\u2019s gotten to the point where it feels quite absurd. I think I used to take a certain slightly-perverse pride in having a large volume of unfinished drafts, as a sign that I\u2019m really serious about what I\u2019m doing. But in this moment I don\u2019t feel any pride at all. I feel tired, I feel stretched, I seek relief, I seek absolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Long Voyage, <\/em>Charles Dickens wrote of an anguished voyager: \u201c\u2026there were many, many things he had neglected. Little matters while he was at home and surrounded by them, but things of mighty moment when he was at an immeasurable distance. There were many many blessings he had inadequately felt, there was love that he had but poorly returned, there was friendship that he had too lightly prized: there were a million kind words that he might have spoken, a million kind looks that he might have given, uncountable slight easy deeds in which he might have been most truly great and good. O for a day (he would exclaim), for but one day to make amends! But the sun never shone upon that happy day, and out of his remote captivity he never came.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I read this I had to pause and stare into space for awhile. Is this the human condition for everyone? Are some of us more burdened by this than others? I am in many respects far less tormented than I was in the past. But the better my life gets, the more I feel compelled to do more for others, and the more guilt I seem to feel at not having done more already. The question that slices this Gordian knot open for me is, \u201cdoes the guilt even actually help you do better for others?\u201d And the answer that rings out clearly, as if a great bell of stirling bronze were struck deep my heart, is a resounding NO. And as I write this, even though I\u2019ve been here before, I have to sit back and feel out what is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/archives\/fasting<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had a moment last night when I did this at my desk (evaluate my situation), and the first thought I had was \u201cobviously I should clean up my desk,\u201d and the second thought was \u201cnah that\u2019s so much work though,\u201d and the third thought was \u201clet\u2019s do a little bit of it for funsies anyway?\u201d \u2014 and within a couple of minutes I had a mostly-clean desk and substantially more peace of mind. Which reminds me: people often disagree about the relationship between a messy workplace and a productive mind. I actually think it\u2019s quite possible to have a coherent model where everybody\u2019s perspective can fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since we\u2019ve looped back around, let\u2019s get back to thinking and talking about messes. As I said, I have 48 drafts on my substack. I don\u2019t think it would be wise for me to try and reread all of them right now in this relatively narrow window of opportunity I hae to get something done. But I do know that I have at least a couple of posts about messes and clutter, and maybe it would be worth revisiting those? So I\u2019ll do that now:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/\/ the trick is not minding that it hurts<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00ab ARRANGEMENTS:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about arrangement recently. the arrangement of objects, of ideas, of anything. when I used to work in content marketing, a fond memory I have is of how me and a colleague would collaborate to create infographics (which were really popular around 2013-2015 or so). We were determined to make good ones. One of the ways we would do this is look for good extensive lists of quotes on some topic, and then I would spend some time sorting the quotes into categories. So something like \u201chow to do blog promotion\u201d might have 30+ quotes, and I would try to assemble them into about 7 main themes. Then I\u2019d try to organize the themes to have a coherent narrative from start to finish. I similarly enjoyed this work when working on my book Introspect<\/a>, where I tried to synthesize everything I\u2019ve ever read and learned in the self-help genre, isolating what I\u2019ve found personally helpful, and then assembling them into a coherent narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past 2 years or so since shipping Introspect, I\u2019ve felt rather unmoored, listless, fragmented. I\u2019ve come up with hundreds of fragments of drafts, but I\u2019ve not yet found an organizing principle that\u2019s really satisfying to me. I believe that when I do, I will suddenly seem much more productive as a writer, publishing at a much higher cadence than I\u2019ve managed these past 2 years. I\u2019ve had fleeting glimpses of some visions which have not yet manifested<\/a>. I trust that it\u2019ll happen eventually, but I\u2019ve been getting increasingly flustered at not feeling much sense of progress. It\u2019s hard to really know which internal reports are correct and which are misunderstandings or wishful thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have a bunch of different ideas about what approaches I could take in order to try to solve this puzzle. Restated, the puzzle is: I\u2019m trying to find a way to rearrange my stuff in a way that feels resonant. One idea that was funny and appealing to me recently was to do an \u201call-hands meeting\u201d with myself. \u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00ab RELIEF: (condense into 2 sentences?) I\u2019ve been conflicted and knotted about many things in many ways for some time now, which makes it difficult for me to get very much done. Most of my efforts go towards caring for my child. I have been playing a lot of Witcher 3 while he naps on me. A part of me would like to write something nice and comprehensive about the game, but I can\u2019t seem to muster the energy for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t want this substack to be about the interior experience of my creative struggles all the time. There are other things I want to write about. But I find it challenging to go on some of my nerdposting expeditions when I feel like some of my basic needs aren\u2019t met. If someone needed to pee really badly, it doesn\u2019t make much sense to ask \u201cbigger\u201d questions like\u2026\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" guilt > hunger > desk > messes > I have 48 \u2018live\u2019 drafts on my substack account, and I have the equivalent of about 200-300 more across my notes elsewhere. It\u2019s gotten to the point where it feels quite absurd. I think I used to take a certain slightly-perverse pride… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3Kl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14406,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14405\/revisions\/14406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n