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s08extra01 · 6 August 2020 · supporters

The One About Writing

This issue explores the paralyzing self-doubt that emerges when writing shifts from a purely personal practice to something others are watching and requesting. The author traces how childhood experiences with criticism created a deep fear of feedback, which then sabotaged their ability to write on demand after an initial viral thread about QAnon and ARGs—even though they desperately wanted to complete the assignment. Throughout, there's a tension between knowing intellectually that unique perspective matters and emotionally believing that if someone else has covered similar ground, there's nothing worth adding, a spiral that therapy and conversations with a journalist gradually help untangle. The throughline is learning to write without the paralyzing weight of comparison and perfectionism, accepting that average, authentic words are better than perfect words that never get written at all.

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0.0 Context setting

It’s Wednesday, 5 August 2020 and yes, I am writing this one straight after the previous episode.

There isn’t going to be much about the internet and what it means to be human in this one, I’m afraid. This one is going to be much more about what it means to be a human and a slight intersection with happening-to-be-on-the-internet.

1.0 The One About Writing

I wrote a long, long time ago, when I started this newsletter, that I was writing for myself and not for anyone else. At times, that’s been more true than not, and more recently, it’s felt very untrue. For whatever reason, it’s always much easier for the words and ideas to come when, bluntly, I don’t give a shit who’s reading them and I’m not constantly second guessing, scanning the future for threats and criticism.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that I’m deathly afraid of feedback and that the reason why is that I’ve grown up having internalized the lesson that feedback is pretty much always going to be bad. It was only recently, after having done a lot of work, that I started to realize that feedback, from the right people, is actually intended to help you. That from the right people (i.e. people who have your interests at heart and want to see you improve), feedback that might in the instant sound like you’re a terrible person, how could you have made this mistake or how could you possibly have missed this comes from the perspective of if you did this, then the thing you did would be better.

It’s funny how it’s so easy for me to coach and teach other people about this, but that it seems part of the human condition is the impossibility of turning the mirror on ourselves.

So I want to share that the last few weeks have been excessively painful, and I want to write about it because writing about it is going to help me. I hope it might help you, too.

A few things happened:

  • My brother wrote a pretty interesting thread about ARGs and QAnon

  • It stuck in my head for about 12 hours

  • I wrote a thread based on my thoughts

At no point was I honestly giving a shit about what other people thought. It was probably that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi flow state, where words just come straight out of my fingertips without having to think about them, without slowing down.

And apparently, interesting words! Interesting enough for other people to get in touch and say: hey, would you be able to do some more words like those?

It turns out that I would not be able to, and this made me very sad.

(Obviously I was able to, in the end. But not when I wanted to. And sometimes, the speed at which the words comes out makes a difference on one axis, at least).

The first thing that happened was that I heard someone say (which is different from someone saying: I’m very careful to say here that I heard someone say) “well that’s all very well and good that you’ve been asked to write some words, but wouldn’t your brother be better suited to write those words?”

About which I had a very long and involved chat with my therapist swinging from both anger (“Why shouldn’t I write about this? I’m qualified, aren’t I?”) and chronic insecurity (“Of course I shouldn’t write about this, they’re right, I don’t know what I’m talking about”).

I spent the next three weeks getting stuck, unable to get out of my own way, for something that I wanted to do, wildly oscillating between of course I know what I’m writing about and of course my opinion is valid, because it’s my opinion and nobody else has it — whether it’s useful or interesting has nothing to do with it and there are many, many more infinitely qualified people to write about this than you.

Of course, the general advice and perspective is that none of this should matter. Because:

a) once I write something and it’s out there, I can’t really control what other people think because if I could, that would be the plot of some science fiction novel or at least some YA magical realism;

b) it would be more healthy to not give a shit what other people think because words that exist are demonstrably better than words that do not exist;

c) there will always be a collection of better, or, even more healthily understood, alternative words;

… and so on.

All of this reared its ugly, stupendously cognitively dissonant head when I spoke with a journalist this morning about their piece on the same QAnon issue which won’t come out for at least a month, and then in a print magazine. Talking to my therapist again: wait - if print magazines were worried about not publishing something because someone had already covered that ground, then… they’d never get anything published, not in this day and age?

I do not know if anyone else’s brain works like this, but mine does: if someone has already done it, then I can’t possibly have anything to add.

To which the reply again is: but nobody can add the perspective that you can add. Again, that perspective may or not be useful or interesting. It may even be, to some people, a complete waste of time! But what it will never, ever be, is not unique, because there is nobody out there with the same lived experience as you.

I mean, you could try super hard I suppose and write something very anodyne.

(Oh, okay: here’s an intersection-with-tech: in this way, I suppose I am quite interested in what something like GPT-3 might produce and how you might think about its unique point of view. GPT-3’s unique point of view is “nothing has ever ingested the amount of textual content in this way as GPT-3 has”, and thus nothing is ever going to produce text in the way that GPT-3 will")

All of this is to say that I have printed out this piece of paper and stuck it on the wall above my monitor, and very intentionally set it in in Marker Felt, if only so that it would offend me just enough to get me to pay attention to it:

So my new experiment is to not try, anymore, and to just be average. Just let the words come out. And then I’ll figure out what to do with them. Can’t figure out what to do with the words if there aren’t any, hm?

—

I hope you’re well, I hope you’re surviving, I hope you have hope.

Best,

Dan