Oof. Again. A blocked writer. So cliché.
And for me, who gets blocked often. Still cliché, but more cliché because it already happened here…more than once.
Here’s part of my journey to unblock. This table is hopefully going to help root out LinkedIn hustle poisoning and too many work-related “content creation” skills (yuck) overwriting art and taking all the good art vibes from my brain and using them to pay rent (necessary, but also yuck).
I investigated why I’m stuck not posting to my blog (yet again) by picking up the rock of my blog and found this writhing mass of things that block me. And just like my bug collection as a child, I put them in a freezer until they stopped moving and pinned them to this table (so bloodthirsty!) to organize and peer at them using a magnifying glass and label them with tiny paper identifiers (science!).
| Existing Frame of “Good” | How my shit actually works |
| Delicate and strong, thoughtful, perfect logic constructs. Detached language. | A wee bit messy. Swearing, but not swear posturing (boring). Sometimes meandering or overly pedantic and a soupcon of flowery SAT language |
| Universality, inclusion, everyone all at once (still great ideals), include all the things for all the peoples | I can research and learn from a variety of sources, but I can only create from my own experience because I’m not producing research or services |
| Focus on branding(!) reproducibility. Art is being able to do the best you ever did over and over again. | Every day I’m at a different level of cognition and fine motor skills. Total skill set is contingent on current, consistent use, which is not doable. Adaptive requirements are needed. |
| TRUTH!! Unassailable truth! Expertise in all things. Degrees! Degrees! | A floating honesty is all I’ve got. I’m not an academic. |
| BE THE BEST. | Choose honesty and art. |
| Bring comfort to people and meet their needs. | I revel in uncomfortable strangeness, momentary truths from an unreliable, but honest narrator, and thoughts built into structures with choices and empiricism mixed with what I’ve learned – may only be useful to a small number of people |
| Consistency in length and tone! Have short thoughts! Have even shorter thoughts! | Bleh. Too hard. Go with what works in the moment. Censoring takes an awful lot of effort. |
| Control your audience through content design. Get likes, engagement, validation to keep going. Even though it’s all bots and AI now. | External validation is nice, but can’t be a primary driver. Switch to values-based motivation. Creating is the best reason humans exist. Contribute to that to try and crowd out some of the worst things humans exist to do (you know what they are). Be sequins in a dress (more about that later). |
| Protect your data and ideas at all cost. It’s your intellectual property (IP). Without IP you don’t have value. | You’ve tried being a dragon hoarding your gold (binders full of content). It’s frustrating and boring. Find another way. |
| Quality Quality Quality Dammit. | Dude, I’m not getting paid. This is just for fun and to make life more exciting. Just hit “publish/send”. |
And if you’re reading this, am I now unblocked?
I don’t feel unblocked.
I feel defiant and annoyed and more than a little tired.
But maybe one or two steps forward in the game. Which I hope isn’t Chutes and Ladders, but probably is.
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