A song to start:
Vibe Check by Gilligan Moss
In the past many months, I’ve been writing in private. Not a lot, but here and there. Though the intention has usually been to publish publicly, at times I’ve felt like Joseph Grand in The Plague, just writing and rewriting the first sentence in the midst of an absurd world, never for any of my words to see the light of day. The Drafts section of my Substack has turned into an inefficient timestamp of different phases of interests and intrigues. A graveyard of unfinished musings that span everything from board games as a metaphor for life to the passion economy, and on being a macro pessimist to, simply, vibes. I won’t go too much into those today, because perhaps here’s a good reason those are in the Drafts graveyard.
Looking through these old drafts, I realize that there’s often a difference between what I think I want to write about and what I actually want to write about. Equally as often though, I don’t know what that is until I put pen to paper. The thing I start with is rarely the thing I end with. It seems that with writing, as it is with life, the only way out is through.
Inspired by a budding interest in furniture, I recently started to write a post about how the objects we own do (or don’t) define us (or not). After a few hours of mulling and backspacing on thoughts, what became of this post was a nostalgic trip into the past that landed atop the broken floor couch of the first apartment I inhabited after undergrad. From a college friend, either for free or very very little, we’d gotten a Danish-built midcentury modern 3-seater couch with cream colored upholstery and a wooden frame before it was brought up to the second-floor apartment. Afterwards, the frame broke almost immediately and became a floor couch. I want to think that my life now is very different from then, but is it really?
Though what I thought I wanted to write about was my grapple with attempting to own furniture for the first time in my life, I think what I actually wanted to write about was change and settling into a new home life. Everything was different, but in many ways very much the same.
As for the writing I do in private with the intention of it staying private, my journaling has been less consistent than I want it to be. I try to at least write when something feels like an “occasion” worth writing about; birthdays and new years being some of those occasions, but there are only so many occasions that happen, by definition.
And so I had to create occasions for myself. One small grasp at consistency is what I call the “WOOM”. At the end of every month, I reflect on and write about the month that passed and then choose one word that encapsulates the mood of the month; a “word of the month”. Yes, I know that a Word of the Month should be WOTM, but WOOM is more of a portmanteau of “Mood” and “Word of the Month” and less of an acronym. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but in any case, I make up the rules of my own journalling habits, so we’re just going to roll with it.
One avenue of semi-private writing is this small writing club I’m in with a few of my friends. My friend Steph started it in the Fall of 2020 and it’s miraculously still alive today, jumping over the hurdles of six overly-committed calendars. The topics assigned there often make their way into conversations, and sometimes to this Substack too. A few months ago, we were tasked with reflecting on self-limiting beliefs. Before that was traditions. And our current topic is security.
Writing in semi-privacy is like sharing a large house with your best friends where everyone gets their own room, or own wing. Okay, maybe this is bigger than a large house and more like a mansion or villa. On occasion, we invite one another over into our own spaces for dinner. It’s small, intimate, and comfortable. A few people are sprawled on the couch, while others have found a cushy patch of the rug. We drink wine and contemplate life and art. There’s some dirty dishes in the sink and a few dusty corners and odd, undetermined messes. Sometimes, someone even helps you clean up the messes or helps find a misplaced key. (Unfortunately this is a metaphor and we’ve never all had dinner together because we’re scattered across five cities in four states).
In contrast, writing in public feels more like turning your house into a museum open to the public. Before the gates are are open, you’ve ridded the corners of dust, fluffed the pillows on the couch, and closed some doors so folks don’t wander too far down the hall. Everything is more careful.
I feel conflicted about the authenticity of writing in public. On one hand, the rawness of a first draft or a stream of conscious scribble is the closest to the original thought and download from the brain. Writing in public takes more curation and thus more work, but that in itself doesn’t necessarily make it less authentic than writing in private. Writing in private takes less thought, if anything. What’s the relation between thought and authenticity, anyway? And also, why does it matter what’s more or less authentic.
I think what I’m actually writing about here is the pressure I feel writing in public. It’s terrifying and amazing that all of these words on the internet will last forever. Even if no one ever reads it, just the fact that it will remain beyond me is daunting enough to make me pause, reread, edit, pause, reread, and edit ad infinitum.
Like Camus’ character, Grand, perfectionism holds my writing hostage from the public, and it takes a near death (of the blog) experience for it to be released from its grasps.
Three songs to end:
Here by Sonnee
Accountable by Amtrac
Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins