PROJECT 21SM Update 2 - Thinking About Writing A Book

“I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It was an odd kind of thing that the moment I became a YouTuber was also the moment I decided any attempt to really make my own life the content of my work was inherently absurd. Weirdly, I never felt this way about ContraPoints or PhilosophyTube or any other channel that featured its hosts going on long, intimate monologues about their personal lives. I didn't even feel that way about channels that are entirely just people vlogging their lives, even if off the top of my head I can't think of a channel doing that which I'm a huge fan of. I engaged in a bit of special pleading that for me specifically to be a "YouTuber" and think my life was worth talking about just doesn't pan out. I managed to hold onto that feeling from early 2018 to late 2020, and then come the new year it just kind of slipped out of me. What happened? What made me decide I might actually have something worth saying about my own life rather than constantly making 'Other Things' my explicit focus? 

Ok, so, maybe I'm getting things a bit backwards here.

Late 2020 wasn't the time I felt encouraged to start writing about my personal life - rather, it was the time I felt discouraged to do much else, and so I felt kind of stuck. I guess that's the point in a lot of people's lives where they feel compelled to go inward. I took an interest in putting a critical eye on my own life because, for some reason or another, all the other things I was trying to do were leading me to the same place - a place I didn't much care for. If there was some unconscious set of rules I was following with how I thought and what I wrote, and I was ending up generally unsatisfied, of what use were the rules? If there's a noise in your car and it seems like no matter what you do the noise doesn't stop, it makes sense to stop and pop the hood (or, ok, take it to a mechanic, I don't know car stuff) - that's about as far as I'd thought about it. So I decided I'd take a weekend to figure out all the problems with my brain and solve them.

I talked in the last update about fractals and I'd like to return to them for a moment, because I think they're extremely relevant for anyone committing to a deep dive of their own minds/memories/habits/associations/impulses. A thought does not need to end. This is something that makes it quite different to the brain matter itself (something that's really pretty scary to think about when we consider the relationship between the two). What this means is that if you find yourself thinking about a feeling you've always had or a memory you've held onto, specifically with the attitude of relentless pursuit towards 'resolving' things, you can wind up in that thought for the rest of your life. It might not get you anywhere - it's quite easy to get stuck in a loop - but even if you do find these 'resolutions', you'll likely be left with breadcrumbs to follow five or ten others. You recall details you thought long-gone, you make a connection between things, and now you've finished the prologue of a dozen different lines of thought that might lead to a completely different You. Obviously, these are things we do without particularly thinking about it all of the time - we make an impulse decision on what 'we' think about something, and commit to it because why not and it'd be more embarrassing to do anything else. Regardless, there's something about the conscious experience of it that really lets you feel the depth of the rabbit-hole. 

I read once that the brain's memory capacity is equivalent to around a million gigabytes of storage, and frankly I didn't much buy it before. That was probably because I'd spent so much time putting so much energy into my external world, desperately grabbing at snapshots of sensory data to fumble my way into an understanding of how to be a Proper Person (I never had a great intuitive grasp on that), that I'd never thought much to turn back and appreciate the mechanics of the machinery sending me through. 

It's funny now (not actually funny) to think that a large part of why I avoided this mode of thinking - "Why do I do this?" - is because the environment I grew up in constantly insisted the worst answers. To the question, "Why do I think without acting? Why do I act without thinking?", I get back "Because you're lazy, a personal flaw you need to improve on. Because you're thoughtless, a personal flaw you need to improve on" - a wall of simple, shallow answers that made understanding anything about what was actually going on with me all the more impossible. After that, any sympathetic ear you can find just becomes a place to vent about how much you hate this thing that's being done to you - in my case it was my mother, who was often going through the same things. You can talk plenty about what bothers you, and I definitely have; the harder thing is thinking about why they bother you and why you allow them to do so.

I still don't really know why the things that bother me bother me, or why I continue to let them do so. I kind of feel like if I did, that would be the moment they would cease to be things that bothered me. Regardless, the process of searching has forced some reflection that both stopped me in my tracks and made me aware of some long-overdue inspections to be done. When I realized I had ADHD, a block of shame was lifted from my mind, and the shocking vividness of my own internal world came into view. All through my life, these were halls filled with stories I'd made up of a hodgepodge of art I identified with, ideas I found interesting, the occasional life experience - stories, in fact, were my way of contextualizing and finding closure in those experiences. Yet I put them in a box labelled 'Fiction' and filed them away while I returned to the busy work of convincing myself I'm a functioning person. The stories were always me, the box was never real - now the façade was over, and I could face the reality that my own life was a kind of story. Shame and guilt at bay, my memories get to be more than a distant fog to be avoided at all costs. With that, once again, comes the challenge.

I'm trying very hard not to get lost in the fractals - to get so caught up in mapping things out that I lose sight of the fact that I'll never truly get to 'the bottom of it', and I have a life to live as well. I also know, with deep assurance in my heart, that I don't want to spend the rest of my life obsessing about myself when I could do so much else. For now though, I'm happy to drop the pretensions about my own "self-awareness" as a YouTuber - ultimately, I'm a person, I've had experiences, maybe exploring those experiences and breaking down their effect on me could help people in some way as well as myself. Certainly no worse an idea that doing it by talking about the fascist politics of Disney films.

Oh, and so, yeah, I'm thinking of writing a book too once this project is done (or maybe during it?). I'll keep you all updated on that. Have a good week! Love you all, stay safe. xoxoxoxo

P.S. Quick plug to my partner Brit's Twitch channel, which they've been dutifully getting back on schedule with despite their own recent mental health struggles. Currently they're playing The Sims 2, GTA: San Andreas, Pokemon Crystal Clear and some other games, and it is a very good vibe. Check it out here! Stay safe y'all