I Hate Writing Until I Start Writing
A silent rant while sitting on my couch on a Friday night
Among the hardest things I do every week is publishing one of these essays.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like much.
There’s not many words I write nor is there any deep research I do.
I’m not an investigative journalist nor a professional author.
The act of writing is not as mentally taxing as working in perpetual urgency nor physically straining as pushing all sets to failure in the gym.
The difficulty lies in the act of writing.
Even with writing scheduled in my calendar, I repeatedly fight the urge to desert—to flee being bored, specifying vague ideas, and giving in to any curiosities.
Every writing session begins warring against resistance: the fight to sit and open my laptop in a quiet room.
My attention then has to wrestled away from irl fomo, text messages, slack, Youtube, and whatever other inconsequential rabbit hole on the internet.
I must accept boredom as I sit in front of an empty text editor, the blinking cursor mocking me as I stare at it.
On the lucky days I begin writing within a couple minutes, already having a thought I’ve been passively chewing on for the past week.
Usually, I’m internally pleading for ideas.
While I mull, the urge to do literally anything else becomes more attractive.
In that very instant, it seems the trash needs to be taken out, the dishes washed, the quarter-empty water bottle filled, and the 2 dirty T-shirts laundered.
My active do-not-disturb teases me, acting as Schrödinger’s notification. Is there a notification or is there not a notification? Maybe I should check…
Eventually, I find a thought-crumb, an idea that can be nibbled on as an essay premise.
Then comes the part of specifying fleeing thoughts into concrete words.
Writing is what I imagine catching smoke to be like. I grasp the air, praying to capture even some molecule of a word that can form into an accurate representation of what I’m stewing over.
In the midst of writing, I push to satisfy my own internal expectations.
Within this weekly commitment is the desire to be a better communicator: to string together words that can accurately represent not only ideas but the person who reasoned through such ideas.
There is the burden of portraying an honest representation of who I am now for myself in the future.
And that surpasses all the audience metrics and subscriber count displayed on Substack.
And so, every week I write another essay, solidifying another idea and taking another snapshot of who I am at a particular moment in time.
When I’m finally done and schedule publish, there’s just a week until I must do it all over again.
Who knows if this will ever amount to anything. It doesn’t matter if it will anyways.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Psst… here what I’m consuming this week:
📖 The Will of the Many by James Islington
My first fiction book since Red Rising… and it’s so similar