You know, it’s funny when I was working on this memoir I was writing I was secretly always looking for a moment in my life where everything would be resolved. Something that lent itself to a hopeful ending for the pretty tragic tale. And in my heart I think I was always expecting a happy ending. Infact I came to expect this so much that I would hang all my hopes on whatever new thing entered my life. Of course doing this usually meant I was a basketcase and that whatever new thing had entered my life was quickly doomed. And I would try something once and think, “Oh my god, this is so horrible. I’m never doing this again.”

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes a holiday romance is just that and nothing more. And if you sort of know and understand those things you can appreciate them for what they are. However if you have convinced yourself that this is your ticket out of misery and into happiness and abundance – of course you’re doomed. I guess what I understood while writing bits and pieces of the memoir was that it wasn’t really that big a deal. To a normal person it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. I think a normal person would’ve brushed themselves off, uttered something about more fish being in the sea and got on with life. Increasingly I had a sense that what had occurred wasn’t that interesting. What made it interesting to me was my very pecuilar worldview. I thought the only way the story would work would be to allow people to see inside my head. This wasn’t really about unrequited love, rather it was an epic battle for love. I didn’t think I was lovable and I was searching for some evidence to support or challenge that expectation.

I tell you all this really just to say that you never know what the moment you’re having is, or what it is going to mean in the broader artwork that is your life at large. Because it takes time to reflect on the experiences you have and contextualise them – and sometimes, recontextualise them – just to see how they go together. I have this growing sense on this my 28th birthday that some of the things I thought were gravely important were actually not. When I reflect on certain friendships that evaporated into nothingness I am amazed at how frequently those friendships were just jumping off points to other friendships with other people, more enduring, more meaningful relationships. I used to lament that horrible things had happened to me and I only had a song or a blog post or whatever to show for it. But I am starting to think that perhaps far from being a consolation prize, that perhaps the artwork was the point of the whole thing all along. Because, honestly, being drawn back to writing and painting and singing has delivered me back to my own hand with a renewed sense of who I am. Once I took all the energy I was pouring into begging for acceptance and approval and affection and put it onto the page, things improved dramatically.

I have a lot of real world materials to draw on from that time of my life; at times I do more transcribing than ‘writing.’ Transcribing is actually quite time consuming, so it isn’t unusual for a long session of transcribing to take twice as long as ‘straight from my head’ memory writing. There is also a tendency to get lost in ‘memory lane’ going down this path. ‘Memory lane’, actually, is a curious place. There were things I had forgotten entirely. There are others that are etched into my brain. At times I was replaying video over and over to make sure I had got the transcription correct. At other times I just replayed things because they made me laugh. I even had a moment where I felt genuinely loved. Part of the reason I had been resisting this project so hard was that I knew it would hurt (emotionally) to revisit some old territory. I sort of forgot about some of the good times that preceeded the bad.

I am trying to keep my expectations low. Last year I was really overwhelmed by the prospect of writing such a large thing as 50,000 words. Especially in a month. Last year I wrote two lots of a thousand words (on completely unrelated things) and gave up. Walked away. I joke that I got into the fetal position on the floor, but it wasn’t too far removed from that actually. The oddball truth, as far as I can tell, is that for me the biggest issue here isn’t managing my time or writing or the wordcount, so much as managing my anxiety. This week I’ve had good writing days and genuinely horrible ones. And although I do have a spreadsheet to measure my progress I am trying to treat every day as a new day and a new opportunity. When someone said something which I’m sure was meant to be encouragement but which instead filled me with doubt, I didn’t write that day. The next day I tried to be philosophical, I thought to myself, ‘The good news is that you can’t get any worse; you can’t write less than zero. Whatever happens today will be a relative success.’

And actually on that day that I didn’t write, I played music. I recorded a song. A song that actually forms part of the overall project. And the next day I wrote about that song. So in a way it’s all headed in the same general direction. So I think what I’m trying to say is that I have faith in my final destination, even on days when the actual application of the process is a little shaky. I’m sure I will finish this. Whether I finish this in November only time will tell. But I’m not going to beat myself up about that either.

I’ll be writing much more extensively about NaNoWriMo over at JohnLacey.com. You can also follow my progress on the NaNoWriMo site.

Certainly there’s been quite a lot of work about the ages of children and how they cope, and also after bereavement. There are loosely three stages that cover the issues: so the first stage is up to about 8 years of age, and up to about 8, children believe in magic. We give them a birthday cake; we put candles on and tell them to blow out the candles and make a wish, you know, we’re encouraging them to believe if they want something and wish for it, they can make it happen.

Now the corollary of that is young children don’t believe things happen by accident. So if something bad happens, it’s their fault. It’s because they bit their sister or they were naughty or they played outside when they shouldn’t have. They are also very fearful. They’re the centre of the universe, you know, the moon comes out at night to give them pleasure. And if bad events don’t happen by accident, they become very fearful that if one parent is ill, maybe the other parent would be ill. Who will be there to look after them?

The whole episode, Give Sorrow Words: Cancer and Communication, is deeply moving, both sad and strikingly beautiful, and I highly recommend you check it out. But this one particular section of the program stood out. Infact it provided a lot of clarity, and a lot of developmental concern. I realised on some level that I hadn’t grown out of this belief, that in a real sense I do tend to assume if something goes wrong that I am being punished. Still. Even now as a twenty-something… If the car breaks down, if the feedback is crummy, if the relationship implodes, I ask myself, “Why me?!” Not merely in the spirit of frustration, but with a genuine expectation that there is a reason, that there is a cause for this effect.

This is surely why I am so preoccupied with ideas of predestination versus free will. I can’t make a compelling case for predestination on the page – I really can’t, but it still dominates so much of my worldview. It just seems that life is a confusing combination of things I can control and things I can’t control, things that can be reproduced and things that cannot. The planet is subject to natural laws and seasons, there is a certain ebb and flow to all kinds of thing, a sense of order. And when things are going well it can be deeply comforting to think there is some rhyme or reason to it all, some force steering things. Of course, as Dr. Turner notes, what is comforting during the good times can be perplexing, even devastating, in the bad.

It doesn’t help though that sometimes things happen that seem so profoundly unlikely as to be laughable. The kinds of ‘series of events’ you would include in your novel except that nobody would believe them, even though they happened. Strange impulses to go to places you wouldn’t normally go to and do things that you wouldn’t normally do. I find when I take these impulses, inexplicable things happen. (Like the time I felt this strong impulse to go to a cafe I never went to because I felt awkward and out-of-place with their regular clientile; I didn’t have time to look at the sandwich board before I heard ‘John!’ and an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year appeared. The perplexing part isn’t the encounter, so much as the feeling that preceded it. I could’ve easily invented a meaning after a chance meeting, but that the feeling came first, the feeling inspired the action. The action was severely out of character.)

I feel as though I am deeply rooted within my creative work. I usually have to work at the things I produce. I have an understanding of my own sense of ‘voice’ and personal conventions. But there have been times when work seems to have originated from outside of me, things that I would re-read and go, “Huh? I wrote that?” Things that I would scribble down onto pieces of scrap paper feverishly as if I was performing some sort of impromptu personal exorcism. I have had a third party evaluate one such piece and he suggested that it was a metaphor for a part of my life. He went on to suggest that perhaps the trauma associated with the experience prompted my subconscious mind to ‘cloak’ the output. I can’t dismiss this theory, but still I wonder…

Most of the creative materials I encounter encourage belief in some sort of external factor or force. This can be as abstract as the idea of ‘inspiration’ or as scientific as the untapped power of the subconscious mind. It can be associated with religious ideas, belief in a God (“the great creator”) in a literal sense, as in the case of Julia Cameron’s work. Elizabeth Gilbert proposes a similar idea, not because she believes it is necessarily true that there are paranormal ‘muses’ but for more practical purposes. She explains that this helps artists disassociate from their work, when the work is bad they can’t take all the blame and when it’s good they can’t take all the credit. This keeps us grounded in process rather than fixated on product. It is interesting that here we are citing paranormal forces to shield us from fear and hubris. We’re still expected to believe in magic, this time as adults, but to derive a different meaning from it.

That’s probably the chestnut here. Believe in whatever won’t drive you crazy; believe in whatever works (even if it isn’t technically true, or can’t be proven). Embrace the placebo effect if it results in your symptoms vanishing.

I guess I believe you can because I know people who lead amazingly interesting and rewarding lives. (I confess I frequently watch Sunday Arts with envy because it always showcases talented artists who are doing what they love and somehow deriving success and income from that…)

I know I’ve written about this in religious terms before (predestination versus free will), but I wanted to think about it more practically. I pulled out my notebook and wondered if I could have my life the way I wanted, what would that look like?

I identified the following desires:

• The desire to be creative. There are things I want to do and other things I want to do more frequently. And I want to learn, I want to study… I want supportive teachers and mentors.
• The desire to be social. I’m lonely. I think my trip to Brisbane made me appreciate just how lonely. I am connected with the world and I can have great conversations and exchange ideas with lots of people at any hour of the day or night, but I still have no one here I can grab a cup of coffee with.
• The desire for independence and freedom and distance. I don’t feel like I can be myself here. I am too busy fulfilling roles within different contexts.
• The desire of companionship. This differs from the social desire mentioned earlier in the sense that here I am referring an intimate companion, a lover, a partner…

There were a lot of other things on the notebook page too about scheduling (my Sunday afternoon coffee ritual, for example) and specific things I want (video camera, my own apartment).

I guess the next step is building towards those things… somehow.

You’ve lost your sense of adventure, dude! I don’t know whether something as stereotypically “adventurous” as travelling would be an appropriate suggestion – although it well might be [...] – but either you’re not dreaming much anymore, or you’re just not telling anyone about it.

What is the point in dreaming? Everything seems to come crashing down sooner or later, anyway. I have a chip on my shoulder the area of which is, say, approximately 186.68 square kilometres. (If ever there was an obscure passive aggressive remark to be proud of, that must be it.) You know as I sit here writing now all I can hear in my head is Tori Amos’ Things Fuck Up Sometimes improv. But then she stopped half way through the song, had a moment of whimsy and picked up from where she left off. I on the other hand had a mid (quarter?) life crisis, left my job, and um… did whatever it was that I did for the last twelve months. Made some websites, recorded some videos, did a few podcasts, I guess. I wasn’t thrilled by the state of my life. I wasn’t crazy about my job, particularly. But there was one lone beacon in the distance that made everything kind of seem worthwhile. But it was a mirage, a beautiful mirage. Lee Stringer gave an interview to Andrew Denton about his writing and his cocaine addiction and he said that after his father and brother died he just lost the will to even pretend that life would somehow reward him if he played along. And that is what it was like for me too. I literally drove to work one morning and (in my car) screamed at the universe. I said, “I have never asked you for anything but this… You and I are through, we’re done. I’m not going to play anymore.” (It is one of the most irreconcilable parts of my makeup; a belief that God probably doesn’t exist, that predestination probably isn’t true while somehow being convinced there is something out there, somewhere, pulling the strings and a general feeling of being cursed.)

So, fine, I’ll own it. I opted out of my life. I mean what has the universe done for me lately, you know?!

Maybe I’m not supposed to be happy.

Intellectually I know setbacks are a part of life. There are books and podcasts and videos in my arsenal with people talking about their creative – and life – struggles. There is nothing particularly special or different about me. I just don’t know if I have what it takes to try. Even now I do sometimes dream, but each time there is a part of my psyche that goes, “Wouldn’t that be great, but I can’t do that. I’ll fall on my face. I’m not good enough, talented enough, creative enough…” Although I rarely actually articulate those thoughts. Instead I go and eat too much or sleep in the hopes that the impulse is gone by the time I wake up. I don’t have any worth. I don’t even pretend anymore. I have lost the will to even try to keep up that facade. I don’t want to live this way, but I don’t know how to change this. I actually really want to believe in some benevolent force in the world because it would make it easier to try. Because, fuck, that is all I really want at this point – some support. I want to feel like I matter. I want to feel as though the things I do matter. I want a sense that I’m not alone and that somebody has my back. What I do feel is that nobody cares, that I’m not important, and that there is a seemingly-revolving door of people in my life. People just aren’t there one day and I’ll probably never know why and it breaks my heart.

A few different people have actually said this to me. Each time I resisted the urge to slap them. I wonder now if my restraint was a great disservice. I mean imagine if people went around actually believing that? I imagine there are two forces at play here. Firstly their subsequent lives must’ve really sucked, or they achieved a social status in the high school ecosystem they couldn’t replicate outside of it. Secondly, nostalgia and romance and selective memory recall skew and distort our experiences. At least this is my most educated guess.

It has been ten years since I graduated high school. There is talk of a reunion. I’ve been wondering if I would go to such an event. I solicited the opinions of those on Twitter and Facebook and got a whole spectrum of responses. Everything from, ‘God no, those people ruined my life,’ to ‘Sure, why not?’ to ‘You will regret not going.’ I think by far the most reasonable response was something to the effect of, ‘You will regret not going more than you will regret leaving early if it sucks.’

It is funny but ‘those people’ (as one person described them) are so problematic. Despite the feel good reworkings of history some of them will likely subject you (and me) to, you probably didn’t have much in common besides age, geographical location and circumstance. They saw you five days out of seven for many many years. They saw you at your best and your worst. They were probably witness to things you wish had never happened and hope will never be revealed. (Although if the initial nostalgia/excitement/hysteria of their Facebook friend requests are anything to go by, chances are they don’t remember those things either.)

Some people will tell you that high school is about ‘getting an education,’ fortunately you and I are much more enlightened. We understand that it is all about social structures and power plays. (Psychologists would be hard pressed to find better case studies than a high school.) And I guess that is what I wondered most… is this ‘reunion’ just a last ditch attempt to impose some social structure on a construct that hasn’t really existed in ten years? Are we all going to compare notes on whose lives have turned out to be most interesting and glamorous and whose lives serve as cautionary tales and joke fodder until the next reunion?

But an even more troubling question presents itself. Why do I even care what these people (most of whom I dislike) think of me? I have these moments in my head where I am so embarrassed with my life’s achievements (or lackthereof) that I start reliving that scene in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where they pretend to have invented Post-It Notes. I realise some of my contemporaries have a lot of interesting ‘stuff’ in their lives. They’re studying for careers in law, or they’ve been working their way up corporate ladders. Some of them have been married, some of them have had children, some of them have been divorced. I just think sometimes I’ve been living under a rock by comparsion. I haven’t aspired to very much. I haven’t been successful enough. I went to university and got some qualifications that enriched my life considerably but didn’t lend themselves to any particularly obvious career arc. I had a 9-to-5 (well, 8-to-4, sometimes 8-6) dayjob that drove me to despair and that I abandoned, determined to find myself and my creativity and make something of myself that way. Somehow.

My life is not bad, but it is a work in progress. Ironically in high school I really prided myself on being weird, on being different. There was no greater compliment anyone could give me than to say I was eccentric. I lapped it up. But since then I’ve been taking cues from the culture, internalising fears projected onto me from other more responsible (boring) conservative adult types. It is as if I need to keep reminding myself that I made the choices I wanted to make because I wanted to make them. The trick I suppose will be owning them, expressing them unapologetically, without flinching, even as people interject with stories about their promotions, their mortgages, and their children. And there is nothing wrong with any of those things. If that is your path I wish you well. But it’s not mine and I need to acknowledge that and take pride in my decisions.

So I was going through these videos, one by one down the list and I was struck by a couple of things. I was struck by how differently I made videos today than I did when I started two years ago. Obviously the humble webcam (as lovely as it is) had some technical limitations compared to more sophisticated camera technology, but there were lots of little things that I never used to consider – things that, today, I often get quite hung up on. Like what I’m wearing, the angle of the camera, white balance, lighting. I don’t even try to record video at night these days, back then I would just experiment with a single desk lamp and hope for the best. I tinkered with colour and brightness and contrast controls to give not the most accurate representation of the scene I was recording, but just the most interesting one. I would hit the switch and hope for the best. Obviously there were lots of takes that never saw the light of day. There were things I had never used and may never use. But as I watched these videos I wondered if my creativity had suffered a terrible blow as my production values had improved.

I’ve always struggled to find my place in the sun on YouTube. The rhetoric is always the same wherever you go; find one thing you do well, mine the hell out of it and do it on a regular enough basis that an audience knows what they are getting and knows when they can get their next ‘hit.’ The truth is I get distracted very easily. What amuses me one day might bore me the next. People dust off the same advice when it comes to finding a job or a career or “your life’s purpose” too. Intellectually I understand our economies are founded on the premise of specialization and that specialists are in greater demand, but, frankly, the idea of doing one thing for the rest of my (working) life terrifies me. So, actually, I just have this vague desire to do things that are personally satisfying, I want to be appreciated for what I do and (if it isn’t too much to ask) I would like to derive some income from it too.

One of the computer programming adages that is permanently etched into my brain is: Don’t reinvent the wheel. But, actually, when you have no idea what you’re doing it can be remarkably tempting. When you don’t know what you want to do with your life but just want to be appreciated and “successful” the desire to just emulate other people who are appreciated and successful is significant. (And when Tony Robbins tells you to go out and emulate the most successful people in your field it seems oddly compelling.) But, frankly, the world doesn’t need another Michael Buckley or another Robofillet or another Sam Proof. We already have those.

I was listening to a presentation that John Gruber and Merlin Mann made recently. (I really like Merlin Mann incidentally. It is easy to get caught up in the machinations of being productive for productivity’s sake. Mann’s focus is much more about devoting the time and resources to building something that really matters to you. That resonates with me.)

John Gruber:

Our instincts I think serve us wrong and we call it like a “Lizard brain” thing. Our instincts tell us if you want to write something – I mean, and that is part of these assumptions that we’re making, that if you want to write – and we say ‘write’ because that’s what we do. But it could be photography, it could be a series of just making a short film a week, any kind of thing. But I mean obviously the whole reason that you’re publishing it is you do want to find a readership [...] you want to find an audience. [...] The mismatch is that our instincts tell us that if we want to find an audience you should try to make something that is like the things people are already enjoying.

That makes sense. But what does a person do until they figure who they are and what it is they are supposed to be doing? And how does a person figure that out anyway? I feel like I’m tinkering with a lot of different things, experimenting, hoping that something will ‘stick.’ But I can just as easily see myself tinkering until the day I die and being one of those people who puts the trite cliched notion “Jack of all trades, master of none” on their Twitter biographies.

In a funny way I think I’ve come full circle. I feel like I finally understand what Todd Henry means when he talks about “unnecessary creating.” In my haste to create a workflow, I’ve created a series of paths of least resistance. Shortcuts. Tried and tested techniques that give me a predictable result. Somehow, somewhere I stopped being an artist and started working in a factory producing a product. Somehow the need to experiment got replaced by the need to meet a deadline. And the whole process became more and more about the product and the feedback; I’d produce something, wait anxiously for comments from people and let those comments dictate (to some extent) future creation.

And those webcam takes… those hundreds of random, silly, nonsensical, profound webcam takes. That is unnecessary creating. I realise now that even in my most popular vlogs it was the improvised moments, the moments where the words coming out of my mouth surprised even me, that really reasonated with people. I need to find a way to reconnect with that.

“As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly. Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never do enough and what we do isn’t right. We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth.”

I confess for all the things I produce – blog posts, videos, articles – for each one that sees the light of day there are scores that do not. Some don’t even get past the status of ‘idea.’ I confess also that I hadn’t really thought about how much I criticised myself until I found a way to put that criticism on the backburner.

I had been working on the JohnOfJordan website for months without making much progress. It shouldn’t have required that much effort. It was only set up as a way to bring my videos together with some other information and resources. The truth is I became bogged down in doubts. It was only after I stopped asking myself constantly “Is this good enough?” that I was able to achieve anything at all.

I care about the production values of things I produce, I want to maintain a high quality of work, but being critical doesn’t help realise this goal. Rather it just stops me from producing anything at all. Weeks go by without a single video being produced, despite a library of new and archival material. Blog posts remain “drafts” indefinitely. Some of my best ideas end up on a dusty “to do” (maybe one day) list.

I don’t want to do that any more.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is a place for revision and editing. I believe there is a time and place for scrunity. But it isn’t at the beginning of a creative process.