Emergency Dispatch: 

When I began Y’ALL READ?, I intended to write one piece a month. Nobody asked me to adhere to this recurring deadline. I swore to myself that I would. 

It turns out that sticking with a creative vision mildly sucks. 

It’s an age-old, inverted bell curve. The high of an idea, followed by a sharp, downward throttle: the fog and tedium of commitment. Here, in the humble valley of the work itself, is where so many ideas go to die. 

I wish it weren’t so melodramatic. So stupid and predictable. But it’s like clockwork. Finishing work feels bad. 

For me, anyway. My writing process takes one of many forms: 

1. Tuning a psychic radio, straining to catch a wave of a discernible melody

2. A school of minnows in shallow water, evading my grasp

3. A vapor

4. A writhing animal

5. A sense of ultra high, ultra clear celestial purpose (fleeting)

6. A need to escape my own body and mind (acute)

Not everyone has such a troubling relationship with their practice. I have writer friends who can produce a thousand words in one sitting, then neatly and editorially rake through their draft the following day. Their faces cloud when I describe my hours of writing like being held hostage by my own hand; they can’t relate to the histrionics. And I can’t quite mimic their approach, though I envy its clinical rhythm. My practice is unintelligible. It’s like trapping something rabid, or traipsing, dehydrated, through high noon sun. Or constipation. 

Not good for somebody who craves perceivable progress. Who loves a made bed, painted nails, and folded clothing. There’s no hard, visible doneness to writing. I am perpetually repairing and destroying a psychological house. 

This is largely what’s kept me from regularly completing a blog post. Never-ending whittling at an idea, the tricky evolution of thought itself. How do I capture amorphous experience? How do I declare, with confidence, any definite point, when I am a lifelong purporter of doubt? And worst of all, the clownish humility: I am ultimately paining over words that will collect dust at the base of people’s inboxes. 

“Every time I publish a Substack, I think God, I am such an asshole,” a friend told me recently. “Who actually cares what I have to say?” another mused, each in response to my plea for clarity––why were we doing this at all? 

My excuse was that I’d wanted something to stick to. A monthly deadline, and an audience to hold me to it. What I’d created, instead, was an instrument for self-flaggelation. A metric I could continually fail at. I was never realistically going to complete one piece a month; I’m too slow of a writer. 

In the past, I would’ve counted my blog tardiness as evidence of surefire failure. That I didn’t have what it took. That certainly I didn’t take myself seriously, or else I would’ve stuck to my guns. That I could be a real titan––a Joan Didion––if I only had an ounce of self-respect. 

It’s not so seismic. There’s no predestination at play. Creative work is maddeningly nonlinear, and life gets in the way. And contrary to my youthful self-accusations, I do care about my work. Absurdly. So much that I whiteknuckle my drafts, worrying them smooth, toying endlessly with semicolons and trading prepositions––all despite a lack of compensation for the labor, and the ultimate anticlimax of self-publishing online. 

And yet I want to practice the motion. I want to muscle through the ennui, embrace the counterintuition of effort. I want to fail, and delight in it. I want to get rejected thirty times. 

This is what I told my writer friends as we lamented various recent woes: dashed pitches, rejection emails, feeling like such assholes. I told them I intended to fail thirty times before the year was up. By unwanted pitch, or unselected submission, I would rack up a heap of nos. I’d log my attempts on a simple piece of notebook paper tacked to my wall––a distinct, undecorated nonevent. This would be proof of action taken. Maybe I’d grow to appreciate the growing list, the gamification of failure. What I’d do if none of my attempts were fruitful was not my present concern; I’d reassess come 2027. 

My current goal is lowering the stakes, getting the work out the door, and defanging the process itself––diffusing the melodrama. 

This includes my blog, the erratic pace of which haunts me. My first inclination is to apologize (to whom?), and then to swear (again, to whom?) that I’ll adhere to my self-imposed monthly deadline (who cares?). But this is a nauseatingly precious approach. This chokehold of a cycle is what’s landed me in my current shame-induced paralysis. 

And I do, ultimately, believe in jagged trajectories. In subtle gestation and slow burns. It’s a biblically hardcore effort, toiling at one’s work; Leonard Cohen allegedly took half a decade to pen “Hallelujah”. But creative fruition comes at a cost. One must accept inherent imperfection along the way, and the broader, incomprehensible shape of generative energy. 

Simply put, making something will, at some juncture, feel like shit. 

Hence my spirited embrace of failure. Thirty failures, to be exact. Along with fumbling forward with Y’ALL READ?, patchy as publications have been so far. 

Rather than fixate on my floundering, or reinstate new, grandiose pledges, or juice this blog post bloodless––as I am so deeply wont to do––I will instead push through and hit publish, shrugging; radical acceptance often feels anything but.