loopinfinite

I have not been able to write anything at all lately – and by “lately” I mean “in the past two and a half years.” I don’t know quite how it happened, but it eventually got to the point where a blank computer screen was this terrifying, paralyzing thing to me. I made so many false starts. For a long time (it’s too complicated and boring to get into why) I’ve been in this hazy, depressive place: I had no confidence anymore and didn’t think I was up to the task of getting anything done. Every time I wrote a sentence, I’d look at it, consider it, and decide it had to go: it was too stupid, or too boring. Maybe it wasn’t saying much of anything at all – or, perhaps worse, maybe it was saying too much.

So I’d erase whatever it was I’d written and squeeze something else out to replace it. I’d consider it, decide that was even more stupid than the first thing I’d written, and then the process would iterate over and over again; each time the stuff I was churning out looked more and more forced and convoluted. Finally I’d just trash the whole thing. My self-doubt and second-guessing were ripping me apart.

And yet here this is – I’m writing this. I ask myself now, does that mean I’ve finally pulled myself out of this slump? Does this mean I don’t overthink everything I do anymore? The answer is (somewhat disappointingly) a crushing, resounding “no.” I mean, I’d love for all of that to be true but it absolutely, definitely isn’t. The only thing that’s changed is, well, I figure I’ve got so much inertia going on here that I have to do something. I have to push. I have to force myself to write. I’m barely looking at anything I’m typing right now, because I’m afraid most of it is going to seem pretty dumb to me. If I can get to the point of hitting WordPress’s big Publish button, then that’ll be amazing, and if you’re reading this, then you know I’ve succeeded.

So, yeah: if I want to start writing things on the Internet again, if I want to get this thing back into motion, I have to start somewhere. This is probably not a great way to start but I’m going to try not to think about that. It’s funny – my last couple years of high school, and my first year of college, I wrote fearlessly, boldly, and naively in an Internet journal that I was (at least at first) very religious about updating at least once a week. When I go back now and look at my very earliest posts, they’re weird: I come off like a teenage jackass, in love with his own words. I did a lot of writing just for its own sake; writing to hear myself type. It was pretty grating, though at the time I thought I was some kind of brilliant genius writer person, and now when I read back over that stuff I cringe and cringe. Mostly I was writing about nothing. Events that had happened at school. Things I had seen on TV. Stuff like that.

As time wore on, my entries slowly got more and more self-involved and solipsistic – so you could say they grew to still be about nothing, just in a different way. They grew longer and longer and were spaced farther and farther apart, and you can kind of trace the way I lost a lot of the naive confidence that I’d had back when I had started. Anyway, the point of all this is: by circa June 2006, I had basically collapsed into a black hole of narcissistic self-pity with a sixty-something page long entry that was turgid and utterly meaningless to anyone who wasn’t me. I updated very sporadically after that for another six months, but, yeah, by then it was basically over. The next couple of years were extremely unpleasant for a lot of reasons and writing was the last thing on my mind.

I think there used to be a particular mental circuitry that had kept me going, that had let me regularly write crap and not worry that it was crap and post it on the Internet for other people to read, and that circuitry is totally gone now. What I’m doing now – typing into this WordPress box – seems insane and bizarre to me and I am still having doubts about whether I’m actually going to hit that Publish button. I really don’t think I am saying anything at all interesting or worth reading here, and that bothers me. What am I trying to do here? Am I starting a “blog?” Is that what I’m doing? I don’t like that idea. To me, the word “blog,” aside from its status as reigning champ of ugly neologisms, embodies this weird egotism that I’m not comfortable with; by starting a blog at all I guess I’m effectively telling people that I think I have worthwhile things to say that other people should read.

For the record I do not think this is true at all. I’m pretty spectacularly turned off by the “blogosphere” and the way that “bloggers” sit around and frame pretentious opinions about inane topics as profound insights; the way they jerk each other off by keeping “blogrolls” and referencing each others’ entries in some kind of queasy snake eating its own tail; the way they aim for fame and Internet-respect but miss because they’re too busy jamming their heads up their rears to get a better view of the inside of their own navels. So I just want to make it completely clear at the outset that this is not at all my intention and mostly this “blog,” if you can call it that, exists more for me to get my head together than for any other purpose. Which is kind of pathetic and selfish, now that I think about it. Maybe I just can’t fight it. We’re all corrupt, maybe: navel-gazing is the original Internet sin.

I don’t know where I was going with that. Let me just change tracks here – give you the lowdown, lay it all out for you, dear hypothetical reader. This “blog” of mine here is something I am going to (or at least I intend to – I make no guarantees about whether I’m going to follow through with this) – update every single day. Without fail. Even if that means posting something very short and very stupid. Even if I really have nothing to say. Every update I write here will be something written extremely quickly without looking at what I’m actually doing, under self-imposed duress. I’m going to strong-arm myself into being prolific. If a day passes and I do not update this thing, then it is probably safe to assume that I have died. What I hope is that this will be kind of like weightlifting for me. I’ll just force myself to do this.

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around feeling all down and stuff, waiting for inspiration. Inspiration never came, so you could call this my experiment to see whether inspiration is something that can be faked, or forced – I want to see whether I can just power through and maybe build up some kind of momentum – I want this thing here to be lubricant.

I used to think it was really easy to write. Words just kind of flowed. I don’t remotely feel like that anymore, so my goal here is to get that confidence back and get back into that groove. It may well be that my hypothesis, that inspiration can be faked, isn’t true at all, and the result may just be a lot of awful, unreadable drivel. (If so, I apologize in advance. If what I have written here or will write here turns out to be awful naive drivel, I want to make sure everyone understands that it was at least honest, sincere awful naive drivel and that I did my best for it to not turn out that way.)

Anyway, if any part of my plan sounds interesting to you then you are welcome to stick around and, uh. . . “read my blog.” If you find yourself unable to believe the ridiculous depths of my solipsism and are shaking your head in disgust right at this very moment, please do not read this thing (unless you think it’s funny, in which case, by all means, read it). If you are on the fence, you should probably just go ahead and not read this thing.

I hope this fresh start thing turns out well. I’m sure it’s possible that it will – and it’s because of that possibility that I’m going to do this. So, okay. Even though every single bone of my body is resisting it, I’m hitting that Publish button now.