Unable to Even

It was raining the day I began writing this. That meant I had a 70-pound American Bulldog curled up next to me on the couch under a mountain of blankets, pouting because he views bad weather as a personal affront. When it rains he will stay under a pile of blankets for the rest of the day, not even bothering to get up and ask for his dinner. I have to convince him to eat. When it rains, he can’t even.

Maybe you can relate.

I launched PickleGlitch.com just under 4 months ago but I actually started blogging many, many years before that. I blogged on Blogger before Google bought it, way back when it was called BlogSpot. I've blogged on WordPress (both the .com and the self-hosted .org variety), and I've blogged using my own custom CMS, which is what I'm doing now. I used to syndicate my content to Medium, and yes, I was even on Substack several years back. I've blogged things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire in the sidebar of Orion.

But then Trump 1 happened. Then COVID happened. The masks went on and the masks came off at the same time. America began its epic heel turn, showing us all, in vivid 4k resolution with AI upscaling, just how petty and awful we have become. I once believed in the basic decency of humanity. I believed that most people were more or less rational and if you found the right combination of words you could change minds. In retrospect, this now seems naive. Maybe you can change some minds, but by and large we are an irrational, selfish and often cruel species. COVID showed me just how broken the world really is, and it broke my brain.

Maybe broken isn’t really the right word. Tangled is a better description, for both my brain and the world. A massive ball of tangled fishing line isn’t technically broken, but it also can’t function. That is the world, and that was my brain.

No, I didn't start hiding under a pile of blankets like my dog. Well maybe a little, but no more than usual. But, like my dog, I did find myself acutely unable to even. I tried to even a couple of times but found it too odd. They don’t teach you this in blogging college, but being able to even is a critical component of writing good content.

My brain has always been a little broken, a little tangled, but at some point over the past decade it became even more difficult to work with. This manifested in a near-total lack of writing output for the past 2 years. I’ve even considered, not for the first time, giving it up entirely. I asked myself, not for the first time, why am I doing all this? Why do I have a website? Why do I have a newsletter? For fame and fortune? If that were the case I would have given it up long ago. For my tens of fans? Nah, I’m not that delusional.

I came to realize that I'd been caught in one of the capitalist glue traps that are so ubiquitous in the neoliberal dystopian hellscape that surrounds us all. This particular glue trap is the one that tells you that turning your passions and hobbies into a job is the recipe for a successful, fulfilling life.

Some people are able to make this recipe work and you hear a lot about those stories. You hear about the actor who was homeless before they followed their dream and became rich and famous. Or you hear about the computer wiz who built a tech empire from their parents' garage. These stories, more often than not, leave out some key details. For every former homeless actor there are still a thousand that still live in their car, or have just given up. That computer wiz had his parents give him more than a quarter million dollars to start that tech empire, for example. But really what those stories are is bait for that glue trap.

Work hard, the bait says, and you too will achieve the American Dream. Once you are in the trap you discover that all your hard work means very little without a lot of other variables in your favor, variables over which you have little or no control. It is the trap that led me to install Google Analytics and a Facebook tracking pixel on my old website. It’s why I signed up for Google AdSense. It’s why I got on Substack to build an email news list. It’s why I tried to “publish” something every week. When I didn’t have anything to say, or when I struggled to put what I did have to say into a format suitable for a weekly blog post, I would force it. After all, writer’s block is just laziness, so they say.

They are wrong. They usually are.

None of these things made me a better writer. None of them made me happier. All this striving did was cast doubt on my self-worth and make me miserable. I took the bait and the reward was a hobby I no longer enjoyed because the constant grind leached all the joy from it, while I continued working as a wage slave to pay the bills. This all benefited the system, but it almost ruined me.

During this time I did exhaustive research on how to make a living as an independent author. If you’re trying to figure that out for yourself, I’ll save you some time: be somewhat competent, consistent and very prolific. Yes, there are other ways, but unless you've already found fame in some other way, this is the most consistently effective, though not at all guaranteed, path I'm aware of to building an audience. I can say without feeling too egotistical that I am at least a competent writer. Consistent and prolific though, that’s not me.

My tangled brain is capable of interesting things, but it’s not reliable. In the past I’ve turned to writing as an outlet for my sorrows. But with the pandemic infecting millions of bodies, Trumpism fascism infecting even more hearts and minds and the never-ending cavalcade of racism, stupidity and bile on social media, my brain just kept feeling more tangled. I eventually let my anxiety and depression get between me and my words. Instead of writing making me feel better, it just made me feel like more of a failure.

Writing became my intermittent, unreliable, lover long before I even reached the age of consent. Way to be a creep, writing. Even when I'm not indulging in the satisfying tip tap of the keyboard, I’m always composing in my mind. It’s kind of how I think. Sooner or later a bout of graphomania will strike and those fragments of thought will demand a life outside of the chemical bouillabaisse of my brain. To find myself in a mental space where this passion was polluted by all of this nonsense was one of the most miserable things I've ever experienced.

Thank the Great God Gherkin for therapy.

When I finally decided to get help, I was very lucky to find a great therapist on my first attempt. Rather than trying to convince me things weren't all that bad, he gave me the tools to tolerate the abysmal state of the world without wanting to chew on a gun barrel. Therapy helped me untangle my brain enough to remember why I'm doing all this.

I’m doing this because I find fulfillment in writing. I have a newsletter because I’m human and I seek validation like any other. And because my flawed notion of what it means to be a writer is to be someone who has readers, even if just a few. Humanity may be rotten to its core but I still want some humans to read my blog. I know how daft that sounds but there it is.

What I don't need is to feed the Big Data monsters with info on who visits my website. I don’t need to supplicate the social media gods with prayers to the algorithm. The toxic obsession with productivity perpetuated by the ruling class would turn me into a pimp, prostituting my muse against its will, but only if I play their game.

To play their game is to lose.

So I decided to quit playing. When I built my new website I didn't include any of the analytic tracking bullshit. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I now use only Bluesky (sparingly) and Substack (also sparingly). I also use Letterboxd but mostly just to keep track of what I've watched. I decided to use a pseudonym so I can say what I really think without worrying about what my friends, family, or potential employers might think if they read what I write. But most importantly, I started writing for myself again.

I'm trying to post something every other week or so at the least, but if I miss that goal, that's okay. If I take two weeks to write something and it gets little to no response when I post it, that's okay too. I'm not going to let these things become another source of anxiety.

I'm not going to get stuck in that glue trap again.