Deja Vu All Over Again, Damn It

I had a great idea for a post about exclamation points and how I have offended at least one person this week due to my refusal to use exclamation points in email.

This is the sort of thing that happens to me a lot (both having ideas for writing and offending people, but let's stay with the writing). Usually, I take the good idea to the keyboard and write until I decide I'm on the right track and keep going or decide there's nothing to it and give it up.

Sometimes a great idea feels really familiar. I was writing about exclamation points, telling how my typewriter (yeah, I own typewriters) doesn't have an exclamation point key. Great story, I thought but I also felt like I'd written it before. I kept going but began thinking that I hadn't just written it but had also posted it to this blog. I kept writing until I got to Gil Thorp.

My friend used to read the Gil Thorp newspaper comic and laugh at how nearly every word bubble ended in an exclamation point. We read out loud, exclaiming every line and laughing ourselves silly. Remembering that as I wrote started me smiling, but the sense of deja vu was overpowering. I opened a new tab and searched for Gil Thorp exclamation points. The second result was a piece I posted last April, the exact damn piece I was writing tonight. Damn. That's the sort of thing that almost calls for an exclamation point. But I'm no Gil Thorp.

Hey, want to hear about how my typewriter doesn't have an exclamation point key? Or have I told you that one already?

Make A Place For It

Anxiety. I've written about mine all too often, but writing is one way I deal with it, so deal with that. Please. I've been spun up lately by my anxiety, dizzying circles within and around me. My mind spins up to anxiety as if it could catch up. I arrived for therapy yesterday feeling all this. My therapist suggested that I resist the urge to stop, avoid, or deny the anxiety. "Make a place for it," she said.

She hits me with these koans regularly. Damn it.

After each session, I sit in the waiting room or behind the wheel of my car and write a bit of reflection. It's a way to remember and keep the session going beyond the fifty-minute hour. Yesterday I wrote, "Make a place for it? Where? How?" There was more, but that's the only non-whining part, so I'll leave it at that.

Here's the thing: I don't need to understand or have the answers. Not yet. For now the questions are enough because they have me aware of options other than spinning up, remaining anxious, and denial.

Perhaps the place I make for anxiety right now is on the next stool at the bar. We can sit together, listen to music, chat with the bartender, munch some food, and sip our beer. Then, at some point, I'll want to go home, but anxiety will want one more. I'll leave a twenty on the bar for my bill and anxiety's next beer. See you later, I'll say, because I know we will meet again.

For now, I'm still stuck to my bar stool, raising my glass for a wordless toast to us. We stare into the mirror behind the bar, anxiety and me, working at coming to grips with all we see there.

"Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook"

Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism reports on a paper examining the effects of not using Facebook. I'll assume the results apply to other social media as well.

Perhaps most interesting was the disconnect between the subjects’ experience with deactivating Facebook and their prediction about how other people would react. “About 80 percent of the Treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them,” reports the researchers. But this same group was likely to believe that others wouldn’t experience similar positive effects, as they would likely “miss out” more. The specter of FOMO, in other words, is hard to shake, even after you’ve learned through direct experience that in your own case this “fear” was largely hype.

This final result tells me that perhaps an early important step in freeing our culture from indentured servitude in social media’s attention mines is convincing people that abstention is an option in the first place.

Newport's blog entry is worth reading. I might read the report itself as well.

Experiments In Writing

When I started this blog it was an experiment about my writing. Would things I write survive in the larger world? I was tired of the Facebook posts and tweets designed only to state "I'm here; please notice me" and had nothing to give. The blogging experiment changed how I write, making me aware of audience in positive ways. A sense of audience can be destructive if I pander to readers, write what I think they want, and whore myself. Instead the sense of audience helped me consider what I might give, what service I might provide, how I might be of use. I learned a lot about that. The experiment proved the blog useful.

The blog turned into a different experiment as I grew weary of and damaged by my teaching job. I wondered, can I make a living through writing? I started a newsletter and investigated how to make the blog profitable but kept coming up against fundamental problems. To make money, I had to build an audience by posting on social media, keeping the blog to one topic, and examining audience metrics. I tried, but social media is so awful I deleted all my accounts, staying on one topic was too boring, and the focus on metrics made me small and mean. The experiment showed I wasn't going to make money on the blog. Oh well.

I found a new job that pays me to write and uses my other skills. The job has proven exciting, demanding, and profitable, but I've begun to fall out of balance, devoting too much of my time to the job, not getting more done, just taking more time. I miss and find I need to be writing and publishing more.

My new experiment is to restore balance, to use this blog to understand more things and develop ideas while still being of some use to readers. Which has me (and maybe you) wondering, what good is this post to anyone other than me? It's a good question.

Things change. Three years ago, I was halfway through what was my worst year of teaching and felt trapped by the pay and benefits. Two years ago things were even worse. Just over one year ago, I decided to quit and was counting the days. I had no idea what to do next, what I needed. Today, though happily escaped from that teaching job and doing much better work, I understand there's no end to what I need.

That makes me sound greedy, but it's about accepting change and knowing I'm aware of only a small amount of what will be revealed over the course of the next three years. There's no end to what I need because every day presents new possibilities, chances for new experiments.

I'd like to say I'll write here daily and return to a weekly newsletter, but instead I'll say I'm experimenting with that and with making time for writing more regularly. I'm trying to return to writing with the acceptance of what I don't know yet and that the experiment, successful or otherwise, will show me ways forward.

When I started this blog there was no way to know what I know now. That comforts me. I put one word down and then another, sentence by sentence, until I formed the writing I've published so far. I have a lot of room to grow and learn. This next experiment in balance and return is all about that.

What's your next experiment?