{"id":14828,"date":"2025-01-21T17:53:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T17:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14828"},"modified":"2025-09-03T17:54:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T17:54:04","slug":"relief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2025\/01\/21\/relief\/","title":{"rendered":"in search of relief"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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i freeze up when i try to be proper and do keynotes, so maybe i oughta write more casually. it\u2019s hard to relax when something is bothering you. how do you seek relief from what\u2019s bothering you? you do something about it. in my case it\u2019s my drafts, so maybe i should \u2018discharge\u2019 them somehow.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been thinking that I ought to write more casually, since i tend to get stuck when I try to do something \u2018proper\u2019. (i have a writing style in mind for these essays that i\u2019m not quite ready or able to inhabit, and i keep getting frustrated that i can\u2019t seem to do a good job of it, and so i\u2019ve been dumping draft after draft, which I realize is probably less than ideal. we\u2019re now more than halfway through jan2025 and I will be quite displeased if I don\u2019t publish anything this month, so i\u2019m just going to freestyle. i don\u2019t know if i\u2019m going to write 100 substack posts in lowercase\u2013 i don\u2019t think i will\u2013 but i think it\u2019ll be helpful for me to write something in a maximally casual way. ) i\u2019m reminded of how steve jobs once<\/a> gave an internal presentation on branding while wearing shorts. i find myself thinking about the optics of that: how deliberate a choice was it on his part? was he simply being more casual because it was an internal meeting? or was that too part of his carefully crafted persona? either way, i keep freezing up trying to give my grand keynote, and so i think it makes a lot of sense for me to switch gears and do a bunch of informal sketches. (and now I\u2019m remembering that I already had this thought in an earlier post\u2013 in when the vision isn\u2019t manifesting<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>I wrote \u201cif i can\u2019t write 20 perfect essays (yet), i can at least write 200 good sketches\u201d. [Also interesting here is that as of Aug2023 I hadn\u2019t yet come up with the idea for Frame Studies\u2013 I was still referring to this substack by its previous name, Voltaic Verses.] ) I also wanna add real quick that I don\u2019t regret having spent a lot of time thinking and experimenting with the big picture, because I think a lot of that will pay off later. So my frustration is really with the distribution of payoffs\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I help people get unstuck, whether in my work as a marketing consultant, or in casual conversations with friends and followers, I often ask questions like \u201cwhat do you really want?\u201d\u2013 and I have a bunch of approaches for discerning that by proxy, since asking directly can trigger a stock response\u2013 a cover story that isn\u2019t resonant with what the person actually wants, roughly the same way people reflexively respond with \u201ci\u2019m good, and you?\u201d when asked \u201chow are you doing?\u201d. Even then, I recognize that sometimes it can be hard to discern what you want (to go towards), when you\u2019re exhausted and overwhelmed. for a mundane example, if you really badly need to pee, it\u2019s hard to have a conversation about what you\u2019d like to have for lunch. you can\u2019t really think until you\u2019ve peed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have felt stuck for a couple of years now\u2013 and a lot of it boils down to the challenges of being a full-time parent of a now 15-month-old toddler, as well as undertaking a move to a new place, which will be the biggest financial decision of my life so far. These are quite understandable reasons for why someone might not be very productive. But even so, I believe that I could be doing more than I have done so far. The issue as I see it at the moment is that I have been fixated on trying to do the big thing with limited resources (time, attention, energy), when really I should be recalibrating and doing smaller things. I do still tweet. Tweets are effortlessly easy for me. But I want to do more than tweet<\/a>. I just haven\u2019t properly determined how to operate in that space between tweeting and writing polished essays. I have actually written some things that describe some of that space, such as resonance over coherence<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>but it\u2019s not quite enough. It\u2019s just a bit of a vibe. So\u2026 figuring out the solution to this project management puzzle is a project itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going back to the pee analogy (sorry)\u2013 I think the question I need to ask myself is, what do I need to discharge before I can really experience relief? It\u2019s my drafts. I have all these drafts I want to try and make something of. My \u2018main folder\u2019 of drafts has 80 bullets and 68,000+ words in it. At some level I think I should accept the fact that my draft folder will always be overflowing, because that\u2019s just how I operate. But from another perspective, I also think that can be a rather defeatist attitude if I\u2019m not careful. It\u2019s theoretically possible that I blaze through a lot of them, maybe even all of them. I could also just delete a lot of them, which is an option I tend to hide from myself because I\u2019m still grieving past losses of notes and drafts and blogposts. (Which is a long story that I have a draft about, but I don\u2019t currently feel like getting into.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, okay. I expect that discharging my drafts will bring me relief. But even that is a project, because there\u2019s so much of it. I could delete some of them. I could summarize some of them. Maybe for the remainder of this post, I\u2019ll do just that\u2013 go through my drafts document and see what I feel comfortable transcribing here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n