to publish or not to publish: that is the question
the unserious & unedited ramblings of an idiot
my last few posts have been rather earnest, so i figure it’s time for something a little silly. a little psychological palette cleanser. we contain multitudes etc.
now that we’re halfway through 2024 (what the f*ck), I thought it was about time I wrote a follow-up to my new year's resolution time lord essay. I’ve written and scrapped a handful of drafts, struggling to find anything coherent or valuable to say. I still haven’t. (Maybe someday I’ll have something to say about this that doesn’t give airport bookstore Hallmark-meets-hustle-culture-self-help-#inspo-realness, but today is not that day, so we’re going to avoid the topic altogether!) you’re welcome for whatever this ends up being. (we’re going to find out together. allons-y.)
the long and short of it is that I’ve stuck with the things I set out to do, and things are better as a result. Like a lot better. And I suck at writing when I’m happy. Or rather, I just don’t feel like I have anything to say that’s worth sharing on the internet.
Let’s not get it twisted: I write for myself, always. When I don’t write, I feel increasingly restless. The pressure builds behind my forehead as unspent words accumulate, and I start to feel as though my head might explode. In my scant idle moments, I’m usually writing something down. Spare thoughts are littered throughout various journals, on bar napkins, in the margins of books, and in countless notes app notes on my phone that nobody will ever see. The snagging point at the mo is the whole publishing bit.
When I write from the bottom of a pit, I’m essentially trying to write myself out of it. I’m flaying myself open with a dull scalpel and scooping out the festering rotted insides with my bare hands. I’m dissecting the wounds, and attempting to write them closed. I’m trying to alleviate the nauseating psychological homesickness. I’m interrogating my emotions like they’re the big boss of some terrible crime syndicate and I’m a detective or something.
I’m methodically plumbing the depths of myself in search of evidence that my suffering is somehow edifying, as though it has to mean something.
I publish for every other person who’s down in the pit with me, who’s also performing repetitious and exhausting psychological exhumations so that maybe someday they won’t have to anymore. When I’ve felt Bad in the past, the words of other people who were also Going Through It™️ were like a parachute. They made me feel less alone, less fundamentally broken. I want to pay it forward by publishing, as though maybe by some miracle, I could say something that could act as a light, could make even just one other person feel less alone, as other writers have done for me.
Now that I’ve mostly figured out how to interrupt my personal anxiety-fueled rumination cycle, lifted the crushing weight of depression from my breastbone, and taken a freestyle dive into the deep end of life, I’m feeling pretty good. My feet are firmly planted in the present. I’m lining my pockets with tender little glimmers, collecting posies of prosaic flashes, and tipping my head towards the sky to view them through my internal reminiscence-tinted reel finder. I’m exploring my internal infrastructure with gentle curiosity, walking barefoot through the tree-lined neighborhood of my inner self during golden hour, following the feeling of the day home to find out where it lives, what its front garden looks like. And my writing reflects that.
So, why am I struggling with the whole “to publish or not to publish, that is the question” dilemma? Lemme tell ya.
1. everything I write at the mo is diaristic drivel
Life has also been so full lately that taking the time to write meaningful, coherent pieces has felt overwhelming if not entirely impossible. The things that I do write are scattered fragments; sometimes painterly, sometimes clumsy attempts to savor all the shimmering moments and commit them to the page in my self-indulgent and verbose lexical rendering.
These vignettes don’t often have a central theme or point, nor do they impart any mystical wisdom(1). They aren’t retrospectives, but invitations to live along with me. And so I haven’t really identified a good reason to publish them. So I mostly just… Haven’t. (Yet.)
(1) & even if I did, who cares? sometimes it feels like wisdom is nontransferable at best, and patronizingly preachy and/or unhelpful at worst. this will not become another hippy-dippy woo-woo “throw your phone into the sea, wrap tinfoil around your braincase, and stare at the sun for two minutes per day to unlock unchanging constant happiness forever!!!” blog. if my writing ever resembles the current zeitgeist’s reductive pop-psychology corner of the internet, please for the love of someone take me out back and give me the Old Yeller treatment I’m so serious
2. my self-esteem is made of elmer's glitter glue and craft feathers (+ vestigial catholic guilt means pride = shame!!!)
Another piece of this puzzle is that sharing my Good Thing™️ makes me feel like it doesn’t belong to me anymore. When things go well, my suspicious mind feels hesitant to accept the win. I’m waiting for the penny to drop. Or for Ashton Kutcher to suddenly emerge with a camera crew. (This is such a dated reference but I can’t be bothered to google if there’s a modern equivalent to Punkd so deal with it.)
My ability to sit with feelings of satisfaction and/or pride in myself is a work in progress, and those feelings themselves are gossamer thin. (Translation: CRAZY fragile.) It’s like the Good Thing is a wild animal, and I am trying not to frighten it away with any sudden moves. Like acknowledging its existence, for example. In the words of Our Lord and Savior Andrew John Hozier-Byrne, “Be still my foolish heart, don’t ruin this on me.” It feels precarious even holding it in my hands, like it might burst at any moment. Forget broadcasting it to The Internet (hi), where people are famously kind and considerate.
Let me put it another way since I feel like absolutely nothing I’m writing is making any sense today: Publishing about the stuff I’m proud of or making any kind of declaration of happiness feels like handing a faceless stranger a very large knife and then laying down on my back completely starkers at their feet. Sexy, yes. But also dangerously vulnerable.
(After I wrote this and shoved it in the virtual junk drawer [drafts], I found an essay of Gabriella’s that beautifully encapsulates the particular niche brand of anxiety caused by hope. So if this concept resonates and you’d like to read more (better) words written by another Anxious Girlie™️, go check out her essay, don’t get your hopes up.)
3. & for what???
Another element of this whole conundrum is that talking about the Good Thing feels a bit masturbatory rather quickly. Other social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok) already flatten the human experience by acting as weird bad upward comparison machines.
We curate and/or take in these respective highlight reels that support the narrative that everyone else is more accomplished, interesting, popular, richer, and better-looking than us. And really, what does that do for anyone? Is this not just bragging(2)? I’ve largely opted out of this particular social currency because all feels positively rotted and I do not want to bring that insufferable “yay me, please clap” energy to the inner sanctum (Substack). I text, call, or FaceTime the people who care about my Good Things. Why should I also yell into the void about it? Who is it for? Why should you care?(3)
(2) I’m genuinely asking. I deleted my xitter account, tiktok is a distant fever-fueled nightmare at this point, and I still don’t have the instagram app on my phone (thus removing the impulse to mindlessly scroll and allowing me to forget it exists the majority of the time. though I have had to use it a handful of times recently for reasons and I have feelings about it. but that’s another story for a different essay.). The distance from the doomsites has helped unfuck both my attention span and my perception of my own life. nice. please note that this isn’t advice. with love, I don’t care what you do. if you want to quit social, then do it. if you don’t, party on.
(3) I did in fact mean these questions rhetorically but if you feel compelled to answer them, then by all means, be my guest. the comments are open.
4. remove head from sphincter, then publish.
to be honest, after writing this, I’m realizing this is totally just a weird personal hangup and I need to get over it. I almost didn’t publish this exercise in dubious logical wayfinding for this reason. But then the paradoxical idiocy of that became apparent (aka was explicitly pointed out) to me so here we are. thanks for coming on this journey with me.
This “essay,” essentially:
(This clip is from Drag Queens Trixie Mattel & Katya React to Love is Blind Season 6 | I Like To Watch | Netflix. Any other Trixie & Katya fans in the room?)
comments
if you made it this far, you deserve a medal. your purple heart is in the mail. but also, if you feel so compelled: drop something you’ve felt proud of recently in the comments.
fellow writers: do you like to publish about the Good Things when you’re happy? do you also feel weird about it? conversely: why do you publish?
was the way I structured this essay THE titular confusing format, or did you pick up what I was putting down? (I fuck with footnotes heavily, but the fact that I physically cannot shut up paired with Substack’s distinct lack of pages and links back to the original text means the built-in footnote feature doesn’t work for me. so I invented my own system. and it’s probably batshit.)
i've found that it's just harder to write about happy things in general but i've been trying to push myself