Finding my own feet

11 Oct, 2023

This is some sort of continuation to my Introduction post.

So, cool, now I have a blog, but what am I going to do with it?

I have been thinking about what to write for my first post and decided that to get it out of the way I would create a meta-post of sorts. Like a stream-of-consciousness thing, thinking of setting a direction for the blog.

As I mentioned in the introduction post, I've made some attempts at writing a blog in the past. They inevitably fail because I stop writing on them; I lose my movitivation and the thought of spending time writing stuff becomes a burden rather than something I do for enjoyment, something I look forward to. Why is that?

I think the answer is that I end up forcing myself to write useful stuff all the time, so eventually it gets to the point where I don't feel that what I'm writing is good enough, and the impostor syndrome kicks in.

I don't want this to happen to this blog. I want to be able to write as the birds fly, as fish swim¹, without a thought to what I'm doing, organic and free flowing.

Why do I box myself in? Where do these walls come from? My immediate intuition says it is because I care too much about what others think of me, even if they have no idea who I am. But a second reason, and probably a more important one, is that I don't love myself as I should. This is something I'm striving to change.

I've recently (2 or 3 months ago) started the online course Buddhism 101 from The Open Buddhist University, and one of the first few videos is a talk given by a monk called Ajahn Brahm about how to be positive. The talk is pretty entertaining (he is an excellent speaker and I thoroughly recommend it), and one of the things he mentions the most is the need to be kind to oneself. Listening to him made me appreciate how little kindness I show myself, how high I set the bar. Impossibly high.

While writing this I'm reminded about a passage from Ray Bradbury's excellent book Zen in the Art of Writing:

[...] What are we trying to uncover in this flow? The one person irreplaceable to the world, of which there is no duplicate. You. As there was only one Shakespeare, Molière, Dr. Johnson, so you are that precious commodity, the individual man, the man we all democratically proclaim, but who, so often, gets lost, or loses himself, in the shuffle. How does one get lost? Through incorrect aims, as I have said. Through wanting literary fame too quickly. From wanting money too soon. If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths. Now we must build our better mousetrap, heedless if a path is being beaten to our door. What do you think of the world? You, the prism, measure the light of the world; it burns through your mind to throw a different spectroscopic reading onto white paper than anyone else anywhere can throw. Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. Make your own individual spectroscopic reading. [...] A sense of inferiority, then, in a person, quite often means true inferiority in a craft through simple lack of experience. Work then, gain experience, so that you will be at ease in your writing, as a swimmer buoys himself in water. There is only one type of story in the world. Your story.

Interesting how the mind can sometimes dreg up forgotten treasures. I haven't touched this book for quite some time, and the passage refers almost directly to the feeling of inferiority (as Bradbury puts it) I'm talking about.

Experience is of course the key. But experience in what is more of the question. I'm aware that my general way of communicating through the written word can be improved, but that's not really it.

Maybe what has happened to my other blogs is that I fell for the trap of having incorrect aims as Bradbury says. If I have to say what this "wrong aim" was I would say it was that of trying to fit in, of writing to please an imaginary crowd, instead of writing my story.

I think that to feel free while writing I need to make myself vulnerable and accept that that's a good thing. To talk about my wants and fears. Embrace my uncertainties rather than hiding them under the carpet and pretending they don't exist.

I usually avoid talking about my emotions, telling myself I don't want to be self-pitying and that people are not really interested in reading about them. But maybe recognizing them is the first step towards self-love, and to really being able to write as the bird flies.

Recently I stumbled upon tiramisù's blog, and especially this post that they recently published about having reached 100k words. In the post they mention they've been following the example of another person, Visa, where they write wordvomits without thinking too much about it. Tiramisù quotes an article by Visa which I'll reproduce here (hopefully they don't mind).

I recommend that you measure your progress as a writer by sheer volume of output. You WILL be a different writer at the 100,000 and 1,000,000 word marks respectively. Hell, you’ll be a totally different person.

And don’t try to write well. Just write. Why? Because you can’t write well before you know what good writing is. And you can’t know what good writing is until you’ve done a lot of reading and writing.

So if you want to write well, you have to let go of the perfectionistic death wish of trying to write well.

Instead, accept in advance that a lot of it will suck. Embrace the suck. Make love to the suck. Don’t try to avoid it or outsmart it. Acknowledge it, face it, and get used to it. Day after day after day.

Funny how they're looking at this text in the context of looking back, while for me it's very relevant looking forward. Reading it I also get echoes from Bradbury's quote I shared above.

Maybe this will help. I realize that I have a strong perfectionist leaning and that in turn keeps me back from experimenting, exploring, and making mistakes. I force myself to stay on the safe path for fear of doing anything wrong. That's what really happened to my previous blogs: I got bored of them. Stale writing is no fun.

Thank you for reading! And remember to be kind to yourself 🌈

#reflection