I suspect that my brain doesn’t work in quite the right way to blog or really develop episodic materials. Not intentionally, anyway. It might become that over time but if I can’t just stretch in this and that direction little by little, and focus on those little changes, I’d never be able to make any progress. Like I can’t bite off more than I can chew or take on a huge, audacious task.
And admittedly this sounds a lot like a limiting belief that I have about myself, and it likely is. And maybe I can overcome it (hopefully I can - and even just acknowledging it and writing it down as I am right now would likely help).
But I feel like I can’t and that I won’t. I run from needing to make the thing perfect. And it feels like it’s me holding myself to a vague standard of perfection that feels unreachable and too lofty, but I don’t even know what the thing is or would be - what the final, ideal form of anything would be like. In truth, the standard might’ve never been one that I actually defined for myself or allowed myself to define for myself - not felt allowed to define for myself. And if that is the case and the standard was never quite articulated to me and I wasn’t allowed to ask questions about the standard - for fear of seeming to second guess others’ judgments or standards, even when I’m just asking for constructive clarification - then it’s no wonder that I’d be afraid to move forward in any direction. I may not move forward in any direction and be criticized for failing to progress, but at least I’d understand that that’s why I’m being criticized. Versus stepping out in any direction - forward or backward, or left or right - and being judged as being dumb or … some other bad thing. For making that decision. (“Dumb” is the main one that stands out. Evil, maybe, but less explicitly - more implicitly.)
And maybe that’s all true.
And [separately] maybe I do have at least some more responsibility for having a vague and lofty goal. Going back to the sense that my brain might not be fit for all this, I know that I do get overwhelmed by too much information and that I nonetheless tend to strive to take on more and more and cram in as much richness and goodness and nuance to everything that I do and every decision or statement that I try to make. But it becomes an impossible task for myself. It becomes incomputable for my brain. Unwieldy. Literally incapable of holding onto everything that I want to hold onto and cram in. And I get frustrated by needing to give up some 10 or 20% that slips through the cracks - or at least should need to slip through the cracks for the things to be at all doable, accomplishable.
Not sure where to go from here. Not sure that I need to [go anywhere] at the moment. But these ideas and trains of thought feel cathartic, like I’ve pressed into territory that I’ve long neglected. Territory that is not sore, necessarily, but which welcomes the light and attention, and the air to breathe.
[Looking back over what I’ve written, I feel like I’ve been channeling how Buscaglia talked and expressed himself in his lectures. I’ve been rewatching his lectures recently. I reminded myself about them when I was thinking to myself that I like myself, and what a freeing sort of realization that can be for a person. Revolutionary, even. - I remembered the quote “I like me” and that he’d mentioned it in one of my favorite lectures of his. And sure enough, it was in my favorite of his lectures, The Art of Being Fully Human, which I’ve featured on the homepage of my website for ages and had archived a long time ago. KVIE has recently (2024) uploaded a new, official version of the talk here, so I can replace my archived copy of it for now, but keep the archive just in case.]
I’m really quite amazed by that piece. [The text above.] I like that I captured my train of thought and it feels clear to me at least that I am working through some things in the text and revealing onto the page as I’m uncovering them myself. No hiding or even feeling a need to hide. Just thinking in writing and writing with my thoughts. To think at the same rate and cadence as I write, which is somewhat slow, even with swipe to text on my phone’s keyboard, is maybe letting my mind slow down, too, and process things better. More fully. It’s a bit more like having a conversation verbally that doesn’t quite flame out because your words are so in lockstep with your thinking that at some point you accidentally focus more on your word choice than your original train of thought and get distracted. Tripping over your words, but in a different way than how or what people tend to mean when they say that phrase.
Aaanyway, to some degree I’ve done that here, getting detailed by chasing down this other, interesting line of thought. But this is a much less annoying and disruptive sort of derailment than the one I was just referring to. And better yet, I have my writings to look over! Much better than an audio recording that I might struggle to jump around in, even with a quality transcription feature. Because the transcript is usually off in some ways and if I can look at my own written words and representations of how my mind was thinking through a particular thing not long ago, to return to an earlier idea, how much better that I might get to look through shapes that I’d cut out on my own and which are likely more familiar to me. I get distracted enough by accidentally proofreading when I should be editing - tripped up over word misuses or typos but miss the bigger picture. How much worse it is to review a transcript of yourself and look for your ideas but find off punctuation and incorrect words (that, if we’re lucky, sound similar to the words I actually said). [Keep an actual recording of your audio and compare the transcript to your recording, cuz damn the systems do a great job until they really don’t.]
Acquiring and refining and maintaining this pace of mind that lets me be considered and not rushed, necessarily. But also to speed forward or slow down as the ideas and emotions drive me in those ways. How nice. How nice it is. And I don’t know what bright it on, but I like it and I don’t want to lose it. It’s a very conversational tone as well. I hope that I can put it away when I’m in a context that demands differently but still pull it out again afterwards. I would like for this to be my default.
Hah, I’m not really even thinking about anything now, just finding myself writing this thing. And as I concentrate on the writing of this thing, as if I were watching over my shoulder, the experience changes. I’d grown a bit anxious there for a moment, afraid that I’d started to lose the special way of thinking and operating, writing with a fluidity that doesn’t feel like writing at all, just thinking, unhurriedly. Pausing for my thoughts. It feels soft and flowy. Something about being able to write by swiping over my keyboard with my thumb instead of firing my fingers out to different keys is nice. Maybe less distracting. And even worse with writing by hand, I’d be distracted by worrying about how bad my handwriting is.
Pick up the pieces later. Make some pieces to begin with.
Get in, loser. We’re getting lost. [So that we may find ✨.]
Ew, yeah. Typing out individual characters feels distracting as hell. Not sure if it’s because I’m focusing on it so much right now or because it’s always been subtly throwing me off. Either way, neat!
Somehow, typos from individual character hitting is feeling way more annoying and aggravating than typos when swiping (with word recommendations). Maybe because you are able to fire it out so quickly but then you trip when you realize you misfired a bit along the way.
I’ll occasionally do both, especially when the swiping and word recommendations/guesses aren’t providing the right things, but generally the swiping seems to be the perfect for for me. I’m rather curious now about the idea of using my phone’s swipe keyboard as an external keyboard on the GXR. It might not work well without clear sight (even peripheral) of the phone keyboard as you swipe over it, for word [prediction] precision.
This method so far seems quite fitting for first drafts or writing that’s able to be informal and conversational. Not sure if conversational can really be formal. 🤔🤷
I don’t know how to feel that a thing is finished. Or to endeavor towards a finished state. Even just defining one for myself. Yet for some of these little entries that I’ve been making today, I’ve been feeling quite confident in them and that I’ve addressed what I wanted to address or feel like it’s enough for the time being. It’s like I might not know where I’m going or have a plan for it or the end goal, but I do seem to - at least sometimes - know it when I get there. Feel it.
And that’s nice. But it’s also scary. Like what am I to do before that happens? Just trust? Have faith? That feels unwise. Thankfully, here, my Christianness is having me cling to the notion of being faithful. Using the word “faith” helps a lot.
I’m a discovery writer, sure. A discoverer in general, though - not just in writing, I think. Though that sounds weirdly self-important [calling myself a discoverer], and I really don’t mean it that way. Though it’d be funny if I did. 😜
Suck my balls. That felt like it’d be fun to say, but writing it out, outside of the moment that it occurred to me, felt cringe as hell. 😂
The sense that there’s a mind there in the writing. A person.
And their pace of mind and revelation of their mind to us, their readers, can quicken and quicken, and slow.
You can, with time, hear a voice behind the writing.