Driftless

Or, in which I examine my need for limitlessness.

I paid for a coaching session with a poet I really admire recently. (Her name is LA Warman and she has a school where you can take classes, and it was one of the richest and best writing experiences of my life to take a course from her. Google her if interested.)

In it, she asked me what my favorite times writing were. And I told her about some of them—how much I loved writing a humor blog, when everything felt wide open and I could be as silly and playful as my mind wanted. Or like when I spent a few months writing a novel (still unpublished) and how exhilarating it was to watch my brain do what it was meant to do, a plot unspooling before me in ways that stunned me as much as it might any potential reader.

And then I said “I just feel driftless as a writer. I feel like I have no direction.”

The conversation went forward a bit, and then she appeared to have had an insight and said something that has stuck. “I think you should move towards driftlessness. I think you should embrace that part of yourself,” she said. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

I thrive in a world of limitlessness. My favorite days are days where there is literally not one thing I have to do, and I can let my brain just wander. (Today is one of those days which is why I’m here, probably.)

The hard thing is that I grew up with LOTS of limitations imposed on my world by those around me (Mormon, gay kid, ADHD, possibly autistic) and that really hurt me. I’m still undoing a lot of the damage that was incurred by trusting the institutions around me to direct me towards “good things” when none of those institutions was built with ME in mind. Because of this, when I go into spaces of limitlessness of any kind, I am accompanied by a lot of fear that I have to soothe myself through.

But it is clear: the more I release the self-imposed limitations on my creativity—and the more I release the critic/editor that tries too hard to “please”—the more fecund my brain gets. And that is the thing that feels good.

I have put way too many limitations on myself.

I have tried to follow paths as a writer that were way too constricting, too conventional, too “should”y. And that is simply not how my creative brain wants to be.

It is stifling.

The world of social media seems to require one to brand and market oneself, and honestly, I’m not mad about it. It helps me know who to read. It helps me find who I want to spend time with. But I think something about that process of finding a niche and sticking with it has always felt limiting to me—I like humor and I like serious shit and I like different types of things—a wide variety of random randomnesses—and I never know what I'll be interested in talking about next.

So, I think that’s where I’m going to start this newsletter: talking about the fact that I’m going to be talking about a lot of different things here, and trying different stuff. And maybe I’ll do some things a lot. And maybe I’ll do other things once and only once. And maybe sometimes I’ll talk about an idea that I never end up trying. I am simply giving myself permission to say literally whatever I want in the letters to come, and to write them whenever I want.

And it just hit me: these are letters. I’m really great at writing letters! I absolutely love writing letters! It’s one of my favorite forms of writing, and it’s also one of my favorite things to read—people’s collected letters.

OMG, this has my mind really buzzing! (See? See how the second I lift constraints my brain starts getting excited?)

But anyway, yeah, I guess I guess if you’re new to my stuff, I can tell you that I’ve had a bunch of viral posts over the years in various venues, so sometimes I really might say something really, really catchy.

However, having had so many things go viral over the course of my time on the Internet (to varying degrees of life-changing-madness, including not-at-all, which is my favorite) I have learned some things about virality:

There is a frenetic energy to something spreading to thousands and thousands, and sometimes millions, of people instantly. It’s this strange verve—a weird mix of thrill and fear. It’s intoxicating, but the last time it happened (which was last month on Twitter, for an ADHD thread) I paid close attention and realized that the fear part of it really awful. This was good for me to note. It helped me see just how much virality isn’t what I love about writing.

It simply isn’t. I don’t love that part. I don’t love the way it makes me feel.

When it has happened multiple times, it’s so easy to have that become something to chase. And the second that happens, everything goes to shit. It’s a true mindfuck on several levels. And the worst part: the work itself suffers. When my brain starts drifting (see what I did there?) towards chasing virality my output ends up sounding stilted and weird and pandering and off and blah. My face just actually puckered up into a grimace as I thought about it—it just gets shitty and feels gross.

That stuff—the chase, the feelings around virality—isn’t the real stuff. The real stuff is the more quotidian. It’s intimate. It contains heart regardless of viewership. It’s relational in a true sense, and not a “viral-hit” sense. (Do you know what I mean by that? Haven’t we all found a new “creator” whose stuff we love for like one day as we go through about 30 posts, only to completely forget the person exists the next day?)

The relational stuff is where the magic’s at. It’s the collection of random thoughts you have at 2:00am that have nowhere to go (so they might go here?) or the thing that strikes you as pretty funny but not STICKY-funny—just lightly amusing, but it’s a true reflection of your inner landscape—or the random sonnet you write after a morning walk that will probably not be accepted by any journals (if you ever get yourself to submit to any), but that matters to you because it communicates something you are feeling about the neighborhood you live in—the neighborhood you truly love and wonder at the history of.

North End, Tacoma

The North End in the spring is good for walks.
Its sidewalks, wet and cracked, yield moss and stones.
Its roads crisscross in laddered tiers. The bright homes
line neatly in rows, yards tended, with rocks
and ancient trees and alleys and detached
garages from the sixties. The moss is thick-
layered--dark green at base, chartreuse on top, with
tufts of other shades sprouting from every thatch.

This neighborhood’s older than my mother
who died six years ago in May. I wonder
as I walk these streets sometimes what other
families lived whole lives here--what deaths, what births?.
What dramas unspooled inside each boxy hearth?
What secret things meant ne'er to be unearthed?

I’m still thinking about the fact that these are letters. I’m enchanted by that concept. I’m also really, really drawn to the idea of writing letters to my mom, but sharing them with you as well. It works for me because of the way it requires subscription—putting something so personal on a blog would feel way too exposed. But if you are reading, it means you had to take a specific action to gain access, which means you are… safer somehow.

I might try writing one right after this.

But before I do, I guess I’ll just send this. My first letter to my subscribers. (That word feels way too cold and almost clinical. An old blogger friend from a decade ago used to call her readers “friendishes” and I always liked that. )

Kindreds. That’s the word my soul feels drawn to. Anyone who subscribes here is obviously a kindred spirit (a la Anne of Green Gables) and so for now that is how I’ll address you.

Thank you for being my kindreds in this lonely, strange world.

Love,

Josh