The weeks tick on and, despite my better knowing to do otherwise, I hear my inner voice nagging. “I should write something for buy me a coffee.” The patient side of me knows this shaded self-critique comes from a place of real desire — a desire to share, a desire to write.
When I pause to honestly check in with myself about what my brain and body and soul crave, I want to write. That’s the case as it has been for many, many years. It’s always clear.
Then my inner voice takes on a more tender and pleading quality. “I want to write something for buy me a coffee.” I want to write, and I do every day. But I want to share. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a particular audience I have in mind here, with whom I want to connect, that feels different from any other platform (even though I’ve always been about sharing my philifesophy). It’s likely not just because I know who receives these posts as emails, but also because I set out with a different purpose behind this platform in terms of what I wanted to evoke out of myself. It was always meant to be an invitation for me to show up differently, more openly, with others through a more regular, consistent way of writing.
Apparently this is turning into another post about writing.
My notebooks hold me every day in ways that are impossible to replicate. There is something, inherently and always, distinct about that process that is intimate and personal and solely for me. Despite the pleasure of bringing some of those pages to a public light last year through a creative experiment by curating my notes into Learning Healing, I still bump up against a forever tension—what I write on paper has a hard time getting beyond their landing place of already bound pages.
I recently stumbled upon an old blog post of mine from 2010 that expressed similar frustrations around if, how, when, where I had been writing or was wanting to write. I know the theme all too well and assume anyone who has followed my writing for even a short time is also familiar with the rhythms of my lamenting. I feel it much more than I write about it, but my low-level angst around writing itself makes its way into my writing...a lot, which even I find exhausting.
What to make of all this is a question I seem to learn and forget and learn and embody again and again.
There’s an obvious resistance in me to simply accepting a basic fact that writing can, does, and likely should take on many forms and purposes, and that it is probably healthy for there to be different purposes motivating those different forms. Personal pages can be a private place of relief and release, an opportunity to externalize thoughts and name feelings with uninhibited honesty. Blog posts provide an informal, casual way to share some ideas without having to wring through rounds of perfecting edits to make sure the meaning and message are concise and clear. (Yes, I am aware of my tendency to hold a loose thread and indulgently meander.) And books, influenced by the intentionally physical ways they exist in the world, are self-contained projects with a definitive beginning and end. They put several related pieces together and require drafts and revisions and reworking entire passages. It’s a whole process that demands commitment and diligence and focused attention that, aside from my dissertation, I’ve never done and for which I don’t seem to think I have the constitution (or perhaps desire...maybe that is something that I just haven’t tapped into quite yet).
The way I approach writing tends to be much more unruly, multiplicitous, bubbling, rolling and overflowing. It’s the opposite of neat or categorically organized across platforms for different purposes, and that is despite numerous attempts to assign programs, folders, notebooks, journals, legal pads, and apps for specific purposes. I write in many places, sometimes at once. So all those programs, folders, and notebooks become subdivided themselves. There is repetition and fragmentation and dispersion and disconnect that carries on with organic, long-standing themes that may have inadvertently become my “voice” to so many, and maybe even to myself. That’s what makes writing so contentious and irreconcilable for me at times.
My personal pages hold concepts in process as much as raw feelings. I sketch rough outlines of images and mappings to capture meanings that expand and evolve too quickly. Arrows and spatial relationships end up carrying the work that a singular window of time won’t allow me to spell out with worded summaries. And then there are banal notes about dreams and spontaneous noticings sprinkled with flashes of insight. I’m often surprised when I review old bits of my writing to find full sentences, but they regularly show up, too.
Concepts and raw feelings. Meanings, noticings, and insights. These naturally inform one another, and it is that overlap which blurs and merges the personal, professional, philosophical, and political in my experience that is inherent to my perspectives. It’s the stuff I process in and through my relationships, the content I develop for “trainings” and keynotes, what surfaces though daily interactions with anyone whose own sondering incorporates them into my frame of reference. For years I have resisted a notion of separation across these aspects of who we are, not just because I disagree with the idea per se, but because doing so renders my own sense of self incomprehensible to me and incomplete to others in a way that agitates my core. And I do not tend to embrace unresolved irritation or discomfort too gracefully.
As such, the question returns, “How does one write in a way that captures the essence, the purpose, the meaning, and the intent of one’s desire and, subsequently, might actualize one’s project?” True to the patterns that default into scaffolding for what tends to become, even all of this is not, in fact, what I initially set out for or even want to write.
I want to write about Gerry Callahan and the simple writing advice he gave me in 2014, and how I don’t think I was ever able to actually heed it by the time he died without me being aware of his passing in the summer of 2020...and I how I feel myself considering it and recommitting to it day after day, which is, unbeknownst to him, one small degree of his legacy.
I want to write about hospice as a concept and how it occurs to me to be the most sensible way to prepare for the end of our humanity, which I believe we are living through. Last month, when February came and went, I quietly acknowledged the anniversary of Mary O’s death and was reminded about how hospice care, in a counterintuitive way, is what gives me the most genuine sense of hope that we might practically be able to realize the liberatory futures I believe in so wholeheartedly.
I want to write about new ways I’ve been growing in my relationship to Audre Lorde’s work after reading A Burst of Light in its entirety on her birthday, and how despite the deep resonance her work carries in my own life, I am more aware than ever that I am not among her intended audience, which has me thinking a lot about one’s impact and one’s “audience.”
I want to write about how I’ve shifted the ways I talk about freedom, love, and power over the past year and what seeds that is planting for my future path and preferred way of working. Through all my learning interactions with hundreds of new and different people, particularly in professional spaces of consulting, speaking, and lecturing, I feel more convinced that there are additional ways we can talk about equity that are, and will be, more transformational than the most common “DEI” approaches that have proliferated since 2020.
I want to write about how all this reignites a sense of calling in me that is surely a byproduct of my “re-piphany” (yes, I just made that up) around how I am truly and actually a philosopher.
I also know that if I just sit myself down and type, something will come out. And that something is better than nothing, especially if one is or wants to be and become a writer. Or a decent writer. Or a disciplined writer. Or, if one wants to simply be and become a more disciplined person.
Meanwhile, as the months of the year progress on, I remain preoccupied with my 2023 imperative to become who I am, including the meta-philosophical performance artist, which I suspect will become apparent through a patient unfurling. For anyone who wishes to follow along with the music of each changing season, here is my latest playlist: “What Would a Meta-Philosophical Performance Artist Do?”
P.S. I also want to write about how I use and incorporate the playlists I create into my own practices of self-care, how that has shaped what I understand to count as ‘self-care,’ and my far-fetched dreams of being some kind of askesis-motivated DJ for what would necessarily be rather unique dance parties.