2026feb27\u2013 funnily i’m currently updating this while avoiding harder and more important posts\u2013 the creative discomfort doc, and the ‘X things i tell my clients’ post…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2025sep4 \u2013 For several years now I\u2019ve been trapped in a psychic prison largely of my own making. We could start by calling it \u2018perfectionism\u2019, though I\u2019ve come to think that that\u2019s one of those stale words that maybe obscures more than it reveals. The underlying truth seems to be that, as I\u2019ve grown older and I\u2019ve grown in \u201cprominence\u201d (more people know me, more people follow me, more people have expectations of me), I\u2019ve gotten more afraid of making mistakes. And as a result I\u2019ve become more \u2018flinchy\u2019, more \u2018twitchy\u2019, less limber, less playful, more solemn and severe. I\u2019ve pressured myself to become more \u201cmature\u201d, to pursue \u201cgreater success\u201d. 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\u2019ve quite straightforwardly made me worse at it all. I know this isn\u2019t entirely<\/em> true, but I feel<\/em> like I was more effective in the past. I suddenly find myself relating to Robert Baratheon: Gods, I was strong then! \u2026 but I do wonder if I\u2019m just moping right now, in an a way that\u2019s 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 \u201cprove myself\u201d and to \u201cbecome somebody\u201d overrode my weaknesses. And I was an underdog with nothing to lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember working on my second book was so much more daunting than my first. With the first book, it\u2019s good enough if you get it out at all. With the second book, I felt like the stakes were higher\u2013 if I don\u2019t demonstrate that I\u2019m on a trajectory of growing as an author, then I\u2019m either stagnating or \u2018falling off\u2019. 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cback in the grind\u201d and not in a good way. Funnily, I warn about this a lot in Introspect\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/abandoned <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2026feb27\u2013 funnily i’m currently updating this while avoiding harder and more important posts\u2013 the creative discomfort doc, and the ‘X things i tell my clients’ post… 2025sep4 \u2013 For several years now I\u2019ve been trapped in a psychic prison largely of my own making. We could start by calling it \u2018perfectionism\u2019,… <\/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":[],"class_list":["post-14834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3Rg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14834","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=14834"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14970,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14834\/revisions\/14970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}