[1250] The Writer's Room

 I’m going to take a deliberate pause. When I tell you that I’ve been in something akin to a “blacked out” state for about a month, I want you to hear that as the complicated road leading to it, the time spent in it, and the means of coping/escaping it I’m hoping to find here.

I’ve been “adrift” for the last few years, at least. My jobs have all been exercises of walking fine lines between complicit negligence and practical necessity. My friends have generally either fallen off the radar or are so reliably busy or overwhelmed you start to feel guilty and disingenuous reaching out and inviting at all. I’ve got hobbies that are mostly solo or cost money I don’t really have. The shining light that has beamed through my otherwise years of living like this is a friend from high school who moved back to the area we grew up. We’ve been to dozens of shows together and spend plenty of time getting food or drinking and hanging out.

I’m perfectly happy to indulge. I like squeezing as much joy out of the things I like as I can. I don’t need to drink myself stupid every night, but that does not mean I do not want several refrigerators stocked with every good beer or wine I’ve ever tasted. At whatever point in time in my life that I pivoted towards prioritizing having my time more than money, I’m “happy” to spend that time “doing nothing” because it’s my nothing. I’m not assigning myself arbitrary tasks nor letting my attention get hijacked by selfish chaos actors known as “other people.”

My whole life I’ve struggled with wanting to be seen and get a certain amount of attention and recognition. I don’t know how much of this is my born-in disposition. I don’t know how much of it developed as a coping mechanism as a means of keeping myself safe in my mom’s abusive household. I do know that somewhere deep, when I’m doing something “good” or “big” or “smart,” that it provides a level of satisfaction and sense of security and being that doesn’t compare to anything else. I say this even in the face of the love and attention and care of those in my life who were not my crazy mom. People looking out for you is a different kind of thing than you figuring out what you need to do for yourself.

At the same time, some of the most romanticized periods of my life were from college. It’s when I thought I had a team or friend group that I could rely on. It’s who I thought I’d be trying to visit and party with in the future. It was a moment in the sun of a level of community and connection that I have not been able to find nor reproduce for 15 years. No one’s stopping over to eat dinner together, if they’re even responding to texts today. No one’s liking and sharing on dying, antagonizing socials.

When you spend as much time on your own as I do, you might be a gigantic consumer of media. I’ve watched 45 movies, mostly terrible comedies offered for free on YouTube, while I do this coding project precisely because they don’t need your attention. For as generic and awkward as they might be, they are a kind of persistent reminder of the collaborative effort it takes to manifest that kind of creativity. They’re playing. They’re contributing their pieces. I often have no sense as to what I’m contributing, or come to understand what I thought I was is something worth shaming or judging me for.

At work, I’m an authority figure. I’m discussing complicated topics like addiction or abusive dynamics in accessible and open or friendly ways. I’m often speaking to what I practice that allows me to stay on the straight and narrow and not let the moment-to-moment excuses give me license to treat myself and the people around me poorly. It never ends until you die. There are infinitely ignorant and evil forces that will kill you without blinking; they’ll be proud about it, and they’ll shape the world you inhabit until you think you deserve it. You’ll be betrayed. You’ll waste and miss opportunities. You’ll fail more times than you can remember. And if you can’t find a way to enjoy it, that joy will not arrive on its own. If you keep your head down and try to power through it, by the time you look up, the tour date will have passed, the friends will have died off, and the “If I could move like I used to” statements will flood in.

When you’re hyper-focused, time slows way down, but in a way that doesn’t feel antagonizing. It’s living potential space that you begin occupying. You can paint the future and implications. You can see yourself occupying and explaining your role. You could be perfectly delusional, but in the moment that’s not seriously considered. Things make too much sense. You can naturally see what you can or should do next. I describe it as a kind of mania, but mania I’ve ridden in the past to create many things I enjoyed or am uniquely proud of. It’s knocking on the door of compulsive. It’s begging for what I imagine the license someone like Steve Jobs took to treat people like shit. It’s an attempt to immortalize something about you that runs deep in a way that can’t be argued with.

That doesn’t mean that by itself it’s good or bad. It’s just the nature of the force at work. If you recognize a force in you, then it’s your job to try to account for it, not glorify, weaponize, or deny it. I want to be consumed by meaningful work. I don’t want to be eaten alive until there’s nothing else about me worth talking about.

A.I. is giving me the opportunity to feed this space indefinitely. It costs more money than I can pay for indefinitely right now, but also that means I see weeks-straight of time that I can capitalize on. A.I. also does a terrible job of maintaining context and not catching drift. I get a concurrent goal/task to learn how to keep the playing field and rules from falling apart as I try to build the big complicated thing altogether.

Meanwhile life is still happening around me. I have bills to pay, so naturally I took a computer stand/arm and found a way to position it in my car so I can run my laptop from my phone’s Wi-Fi and plug into a jumper battery and code between DoorDash orders. That’s normal, right? That’s safe? That’s reasonable? That’s not a story of a desperate need to matter? That’s not being punished by anxiety-driven “my life’s clock is running down” sensibilities regarding efficiency?

I’ve thought, good and hard, about leaving this chair for days. I made cursory preparations like heading into town for food and errands and that experimentation as to whether I could feasibly code from my car. I can. The desire to sort of melt into my environment and this work is very real and very powerful. It’s close to what I felt as a child in what might’ve been described as a budding addiction to video games. I don’t have the same kind of desperate and furious rush, but the world I’m occupying right now is very sticky. It feels “wrong” to do anything else besides maximize my output. It feels like I’d be missing an opportunity window that I’ve been raging at in the rear-view my entire life.