I want to write this while I still feel it. I want to blister my way through it and have it done without being overly critical or losing too much momentum. (Losing a sense of personal momentum is often the reason that some blog posts remain forever drafts.)

I decided recently that I would post four blog posts a week at JohnLacey.com. The thing about that this week is that I didn’t want to do it. I felt such amazing resistance to doing it. I couldn’t think of anything I didn’t want to do more than that. But here’s the really curious thing – the blog posts were all but done. I added a line to each of the two posts remaining, added some tags and hit the publish button and they were done. And I think they were great blog entries. I can’t for the life of me understand why I procrastinated over doing them for four days. It makes no sense.

Today I made a video and it was amazing – the process of creating it, I mean. I felt really good while I was creating it. I got caught up in the process and lost all track of time. It was a lovely sensation. But once it was finished and uploaded, I sat around anxiously, reluctant to start anything else. I had produced this thing and it seemed I was waiting for some feedback. I wasn’t taking a break or resting on my laurels, I was actively protesting against the part of me that wanted to create something more, something else. And the point I would like to make here is that it feels horrible because you feel torn. There is a part of you that wants to make something else but it is fighting with another part of you that is scared, and you’re very conscious of this inner conflict and it fuels its own extra source of anxiety.

It seems as though I spend half my time creating stuff and half my time resisting creating things, feeling awful about not creating things. I think it has finally dawned on me what it means when writers talking about needing to write every day. I think I finally understand the benefits of having a new project lined up before you finish your existing one. It is just too easy to get bogged down in rationalising things when you’re not creating things, it just becomes so easy to get lost in all those unarticulated fears and existential angst.

And when you’re really in the flow of creating something that means something to you, it’s truly magical. Because when it happens you really have to take a deep breath and think, “I put this off for four days? What the hell was I thinking? THIS is amazing!”

The trick of course is taking all these understandings and boiling them down into a set of practices, really working them into my life so that I follow up on things even when I don’t feel like it. That’s the next step, I suppose.

Farewell NaNoWriMo, though I hardly knew ye. I wrote some 7,356 words in the first week and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the month. And not because ‘real life’ came between me and my lofty writing ambitions. This is an excuse a lot of people will cite and I imagine for most of them that is quite true. For me NaNoWriMo set off some horrible internal battle. It was horrendous.

I can write this.
(Sure you can.)
No, really. Just 2000 words a day. It’ll be fine.
(Then what happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday?)
It doesn’t have to be ‘good.’ It just has to ‘be.’
(Then why aren’t you ‘doing’ it?)
Maybe I can’t do this.
(Of course you can’t do this! You were a fool to think you could.)
But random annoying happy 14 year olds are doing this and ‘winning…’
(Ahem. Yes…)
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’m not sure I like writing. Infact I think I might hate it. Maybe I’m not cut out for this? Maybe I don’t have the right to refer to myself as a ‘writer’ or even an ‘artist.’ Hmmm.

NaNoWriMo was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. I’m not creating anything. For the most part I don’t want to. I’ve come to hate and resent the world. There’s no joy to be had here. It’s all about “harm minimisation.” I read Julia Cameron’s books (The Artist’s Way, Walking In This World) and think, “Wow! This woman gets it.” I find her words soothing and comforting. Unfortunately at times I am so comforted in those moments that I relax and don’t do anything any more. I don’t do the exercises, I don’t do the art, I don’t do ‘the work.’ I don’t even show up. But one of the things she talks about is having a self to express, about being somebody. Cultivating experiences. Filling the artistic well so you have things to draw upon when you address the page, stage or canvas.

I think I need to do that more. Actually get out and do things, experience some sort of life, develop a self worth expressing. I see myself too much from other people’s vantage points. I need to say what I want more. I need to be more honest with people. I need to dream more and do more. But I hate dreaming. Dreaming is the first stop towards disappointment. But what is life without dreaming? It’s pretty sucky. Perhaps more sucky than this dreaming and failing. I certainly don’t feel like I have much to lose. So, wonderful. Let’s keep the expectations low. That will help. Probably.

I am traveling interstate over New Years Eve. There’s this other world waiting for me somewhere else. I don’t know what exactly. Infact I’m quite wary of it. My inner control freak is alive and well, and wants to endure experiences it can manage carefully. And actually it’s quite foolish because there is so much outside of my control. Sometimes you’ve just got to go along for the ride. But I’ve never done that. I micromanage my environment as an adult because I had to micromanage it as a kid. I feel foolish when I take chances and things don’t work out. I feel foolish when I tell someone how much I care about them and their response is unenthusiastic. I tell myself each and everytime that the chance was worth taking and that the action was noble, but I don’t really ‘feel’ it. That’s the theory of it, but the reality of it is much closer to “Well I’m never doing that again.”

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I don’t know very much… and that’s okay, hopefully.

I’ve started a new YouTube channel, JohnLaceyTV. This isn’t the first additional YouTube channel I’ve started, infact it’s not even the first YouTube channel I’ve started to feature my real name. I wanted to take a moment to explain to you (and myself) why I have started it, why I am using it, and why I’ll continue to use my other account too.

I have JohnLacey.com and JohnLacey.net. This is slightly confusing, but there are reasons for this. Some of them relate purely to my own vanity (being frustrated to discover I’m one of a billion John Laceys on the planet and wanting to try to own the name online). Some of them were practical, logistical… I only registered JohnLacey.net initially because I was moving all my sites and wanted a new email address to use with all my online accounts. There is an element of link building involved too. And these things are all… well, they are what they are, I suppose. But they’re not really that important.

The real difference, in my eyes, is the function of the two sites. And the content. This is my personal blog. This is a dumping ground for random thoughts. I joke that I’d close down my ‘personal blog’ except “where would all my existential angst end up then?” And this is true. JohnLacey.com is obstensibly a professional site for someone who has shunned professional life. I voluntarily left the work force to explore some whims I have. But on that site I write about writing, about wanting to write, I write about creativity, I collect interesting quotes from people I admire. There is a creative focus there because I want to be a creative person. I’ve been trying to express this sentiment for a long time and every time I do the words ‘lofty’ and ‘ambitions’ come to mind. At times I can’t begin to imagine what an artist is or does, but I know I want to be one. I know this when I watch Sunday Arts in awe and with a degree of envy. I watch people make sculptures and paint and draw, and I think… ‘wow, this is amazing!’

And then there is JohnOfJordan.com… This is about YouTube and community. Not about ‘the community’ really, so much as about ‘my community.’ I interview my friends about their hopes and dreams and video technique. I include tips and thoughts and ocassionally a video of my own. The point I want to make is that I never had any desire to become a video maker. I wasn’t one of the drama kids in high school. I hadn’t done any acting since the primary school play Nowhere Boy (where I was given an important supporting role until the moody director, hell bent on living his dreams through school children, recast my role and made me an extra). My attraction to this site was all about people and not the ‘famous’ people waving down from their ivory towers, but the people who were just like me somewhere else in the world sharing their lives, sharing their world, sharing themselves. (And I suppose this is what people like Rohan and Christopher Mast mean when they talk about YouTube being a “social networking site.”) I’ve come to enjoy video production and be deeply fascinated by it, but it was always in service of connecting with people and people I cared about.

But still those ‘lofty ambitions’ hover. Still that artistic aspiration exists deep within me. JohnOfJordan is community directed, and that is what I love about it. But I guess I started JohnLaceyTV so I had a forum where I could be more self-directed. A place where I could be myself, under my own name, and perhaps shed some of the YouTubian concerns I had fostered with JohnOfJordan. It is oddly liberating to start again, to start from scratch. Working on a video that I’m proud of and putting it on a channel four people have heard of makes me think about the work, the art, more than the views… (I think viewers of either will appreciate content that is collected slightly thematically too.)

I always felt this great pressure to ‘be’ one thing and to be ‘the best’ of that one thing. I struggled with that idea for a really long time, because everyone is an ‘expert’ and everyone thinks you should be an ‘expert’ too. And not just an expert but ‘the’ expert. And for me the most rewarding thing has been not choosing between competing desires, but finding a way to explore as many of them as I can. It is about trying to honour all of the pieces of me.