Dancing on my own

Ridiculously

Hello friend, can I call you friend? Thanks for clicking. We’re now intertwined in a metaversical tango, you and I. Now I know what you’re thinking, I’ve been where you are right now. Is this worth my time? There is so much to do. Where is he going with this? I don’t really like dancing.

You’ve read the first paragraph, it’s okay if you need to check another tab real quick. But fear not friend, today I am going to take you back. Back to a simpler time, before our collective brains atrophied and we could do one thing at a time. Distraction is likely leaking from the open wounds in your brain, and it’s not your fault.

It’s funny how it’s always up to us to fix problems we didn’t create. I will cast my response in the form of a song. Music has conjured consciousness for centuries, and I believe she can still throw her weight around. Take my hand, let’s make our way to the dance floor.

I'm in the corner, watching you kiss her, ooooooh
I'm right over here, why can't you see me? oooooh

Do you hear that, my dear? It’s the sound of Robyn’s sweet symphony echoing through the metaverse.

…I keep dancing on my own

Now that we’ve settled in with a dance, it is time to woo you with some eccentric tales of wisdom. Unfortunately I am out of wisdom, but I always carry an ample supply of eccentricity. When I first decided on becoming a writer, I had expected riches and fame to shower me within the first few weeks. Those few weeks have been and gone.

A good friend of mine started her Substack a little while before I did and her second post went, in contemporary vernacular, viral. After seeing this I had begun to contemplate how I would handle my inevitable celebrity. Would I reveal my face to adoring fans or would I perhaps let the mystery enchant? Are book tours tiring?

One of the most difficult parts of my transition from Tweeterino to Substack was, and remains, adjusting to quality over quantity. Now you (my adoring reader) are the quality, of course. I would go so far as to say you might be the very best, of the highest calibre there ever was. It is quite a paradox to preach the joys of reading to those who are already reading, but whom else is there that will answer the call?

After some weeks passed by and I continued to write, I found myself, for the first time in many years, troubled by a lack of engagement in something I wrote online. Channeling my inner 17-year-old self (fortunately without a Bieber-esque fringe this time), I would refresh the page seconds after posting and wait for the likes to roll in.

But alas, in writing as in the butterfly, beauty must reveal itself slowly, flap its delicate wings, then die a peaceful death. I would spend many hours in my dark cocoon putting the words together, only to finally release my dreams to the world and watch their brittle limbs struggle to fly.

Although celebrity has evaded me, I’ve come to understand how delightful it must be to have someone show up at your art exhibition and say wow. I receive messages, likes and comments which mean the world. Through this I’ve also discovered that the value of earned money completely hinges on the work that earned it. Value is a perception.

One of the strange outcomes of slow, steady growth has been more freedom in my writing. I’ve found myself thinking, as discussed in the introduction, that I am mostly dancing on my own. Of course, I have some delightful people accompanying me on the dance floor, but why would I not explore my deepest and strangest forms?

There is also liberty to be found in staying outside of the box instead of contorting myself trying to fit in. I’ve seen people online find success through one form of creation and find themselves stuffed in that box for the rest of their days. Rothko started out sketching, the world would have been robbed of his later abstraction if he resigned to fate.

If this is my expression and my art form, why would I self-censor ridiculousness? Ridiculousness is the edge. If it sounds good in my head at 2am the night before deadline, so it shall stay. But there is a strange yin and yang to expression and validation.

So here we are, just the two of us. I’d like to log off, you’d like to read more. I’d like more people to read so that my inspiration continues, but I’d not like too many people to read or perhaps I will posture my writing solely to please those of the masses. What if that means no more dancing?

More and more I convince myself that writing has a permanent place in my life, sometimes I can feel the demons transferring from my brain to the page. Less and less do I care about virality.

I no longer have to work for a living. If I was to reconfigure myself to only produce work that is agreeable to all, then you all become my collective master, and I am no longer truly creating, or free. At the end of the day I am a mere mortal, which means I fear both failure and judgement.

In my day to day life I have achieved a certain level of success, and my fear of judgement rarely comes from insecurity. I no longer have to deal with appeasing a boss or whispers from co-workers. My parents are proud of me, and I am able to support them as they once were able to me.

So I say, bring it on motherfuckers. A life isn’t really worth living if one isn’t judged, the more regular the better. With learning language(s), there is a certain gauntlet to run each time you speak. Sometimes you say dick when you meant to say bread.

I get a healthy dose of failure through language, but it’s not a creative pursuit. I think sending your creation out into the world and normalising its failure is the first several steps towards freedom that allows genuine art. Nabokov wrote in his Autobiography that his first published book was so bad and got so mocked by critics that it numbed him for the rest of his career from the impacts of judgement.

For me, writing each week means an acceptance of failure. In every overnight success, there are an infinite number of small decisions that lead to the inevitable bang. I realised the other day that my measurements of failure were rather dim.

One of my favourite articles on this website, one that I’ve shared with many friends, I had never liked nor commented on. After this realisation, I had begun to consider that perhaps the same is true for my own writing.

There is a very real world, perhaps the most likely one, where people enjoy my words, without my knowledge of them doing so. An arbitrary digital heart left un-clicked does not undo the bond we share as writer and reader. The darkness may just be a lack of light.

Did you know you can’t add darkness to a room? You can only dim or reduce the light until eventual darkness. It’s quite a nice way to view life, there is no true darkness, there is just different degrees of faded light. I spoke to a friend of mine who is an artist, he told me about some referral work he received from a guy who had never interacted with any of his posts or sent any messages.

Many years later, he reached out and expressed how much he loved the work and how many people he had shared it with. I am just like that guy, but with my favourite article. I had it bookmarked for weeks, I finally read it, loved it, and did nothing to tell the author any of these things.

My lack of light was gone. What does it matter if a post gets 5 likes (pls like my posts)? That is no way to measure impact. It feels all the sweeter knowing my commitment to the craft flows beyond measurable impact. If I wanted to delegate the feeling of achievement I’d run a marathon, or sign up to an Ironman.

My favourite poem (yes I’m a guy with a favourite poem, no I don’t know many poems) is Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII:

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself

This is the sentiment I try to carry in life. We cannot always be in bloom, we cannot always have our best day, but fuck we deserve to be loved based on our possibility. Everyone has in them the potential to thrive, and it is that which we should all measure each other on.

This is the kindness I grant myself, while I gently tap these keys in the middle of the night. I am slowly, maybe even impossibly slowly, progressing towards my seasonal bloom. Maybe it is something great, maybe it is something small, but it is in the pursuit of trying, that I truly appreciate myself.

The surface area of self-love grows with the amount of things I try to create, with the amount of difficult journeys I venture into. I do not think purpose is to be found in work or in the pursuit of wealth. I think fulfilment is to be found in doing something that feels right and loving yourself for how great you could be.