Turning on the water

I’ve been wanting to write more in a public way - mostly for the accountability, the usefulness of having to show up somewhere frequently as “myself” - not my roles of partner or mother or whatever else I’m think I’m doing on the earth. It occurs to me as I write this that it would probably be more appropriate to say I need to show up for myself. We also just moved and since the house is in disarray, there is an invitation to some kind of organizing principal here, online. I mentioned the desire to write more frequently to my friend Amelia and she suggested a Substack (do I sound 100 years old yet? I’ll get there, don’t worry). My partner has been enjoying Saeed Jones’ Werk in Progress and mentioned the same thing. So here we are.

To be honest, when I saw the draft template I was like “why would I take all my headaches to a new place?” I have written Sut Nam Bonsai on Blogger for years and while it’s totally fine and even fun, I recall many nights of being gripped by obsessive design-mind as I formatted logos and played with fonts. I’m looking for the opposite of perfection and presentation right now. I’m looking for a place to process.

I have even had the idea to check in here every day. I’m not looking to bomb people with content, but the concept of this as a daily practice is calling to me in a way that consistency almost never does. (The most consistent thing in my life is water. I compulsively, alarmingly, hydrate.)

I have pretty big commitment issues so of course I’m afraid to fail in this goal / intention / whatever you call it. When I said I might write every day, my partner was like, okay but once a week would be totally fine? Especially since I previously only wrote publically on my blog a few times a year. But if the goal is to process, to show up for myself, a daily visit makes sense to me.

Of course stating this feels vulnerable. WHAT IF I FAIL? Etc. etc. But, I don’t know . . . something I will probably mention (ad nauseum?) is that I had pretty extensive brain surgery in December (actually, the procedure itself wasn’t all over my head or anything, but it was long) and since then, the reality of how fleeting our lives are has really started to sink in - or, at least, for now it’s a pretty big organizing principal in my life. When I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor last fall (fine, late August, but it feels like quibbling to say that), the thought that I might not make it - which was not a statistically large probability, fyi - the chance for facial paralysis from the surgery was much higher and, weirdly, something I didn’t ever really fear . . . like, I’ve always felt different from other people. It would make total sense to me if my face reflected that.

That was a long unfinished thought so I’m just going to start a new paragraph, lol. What I’m getting at is something I heard in a Mike Birbiglia podcast with Jack Antonoff, who was talking about a concept in his music writing circles: can you dare to suck? It made sense to me immediately. Can you take the risks of creativity, which are really the only forms of freedom (to me), even though inherent in risk is the chance to fail?

So that’s what this is, too.