On Burning Out

It’s mid-August in New York and I’m writing here again for the first time in over a month. If you detect a little guilt in my tone, it’s because even though there isn’t a huge audience for this little blog (which was part of the point of starting it) I set a goal for myself to do at least one of these a week.

It’s been six weeks since I hit that goal. There are reasons for this, which will sound like excuses but they’re not.

In short: July was an intense month.

At work, we launched a new space for artists and a video series that I’m writing, filming and hosting. On the social front, I had family visits from two different countries. They’d both gone through a long and brutal quarantine, and so I tried to give them as much time as I could during their stay. I also started on a few new projects, spurred on by my approved work permit and an eagerness to pursue paying projects. All this on top of the YouTube channel, a running habit, setting up a store and feeding social media.

These are all good things, of course. Just too many at the same time. (Like I said: reasons, not excuses.)

And so: I may have burned myself out a bit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Usually, when I burn out, it’s preceded by a successful period of prolific output. I get excited because things are working just as planned. People around me get excited. I commit to more things and I pile on, because I feel invincible.

“I can do it all,” I tell myself, and before I know it, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Downtime is the first to go, and adequate rest with it. Quality starts to slip. I wear myself out meeting every task. Something in the machine fizzles, sparks and spirals out of control. BOOM. Crash and burn.

This is a pattern that has gotten less dramatic over the years. This time, there was no crash-and-burn.

July was busy, but everything went as intended, minus those blog posts. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m about to hit my limit and pulling back. We are our own worst taskmasters sometimes. Remember: to thyself be kind.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day and I took the entire day off: went to Forbidden Planet, picked up a bunch of books and devoured them at a coffee shop, on the train home and for the rest of the evening until I feel asleep. Today, I’m still indulging in a bit of healing over my Sunday chores. I’m writing this now after an epic laundry-folding session, letting the words unspool and sit on the page just so. The stress is fading. I feel relief.

Writing this has been such a comfort. I hope it’s been a comfort to read. More soon.

Andrew Drilon / New York / 8.15.2021

Fragments in the Void

Today’s bus sketch.

Okay, so I’m just starting a quick sentence to note down that I don’t feel like I have anything to write about today.

My mind keeps coming back to that quote by Austin Kleon, about how you don’t write daily to say things that you already have to to say—instead, you’re writing to figure out your thoughts and parse them out in words. (Note to self: find the actual wording of this quote for later.)

I think I get the principle of it, but its practice and execution feels much easier said than done. Obviously, as a human being, I have no shortage of thoughts, but they’re mostly disjointed, scattered fragments that often don’t cohere into anything that resembles all the lovely writing I read on a daily basis.

This is compounded by the info-dense world we live in, where an ocean of notifications, messages and ideas threaten to drown us in information. So many of my day-to-day musings never resolve into anything substantial. Incomplete, they float off into the void, conclusions aborted, as my attention divides across manifold distractions.

I suspect this is the same for everyone. Good writers just have the clarity of purpose, and probably a good measure of patience, to organize their thoughts on paper.

That’s where the craft of it comes in, I guess. Find a nugget of a fragment of a whisper of a thread, and braid it together with some offhand knowledge. Splice in some memories and wrap it up in language to produce a readable string of sentences. I dream of doing this without struggle, letting the words flow out of me the way I imagine it does for the great writers of our species. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at it, like Murakami on a marathon, focused on the journey rather than the destination, each word a step that takes you further toward that horizon.

Hey look: a few paragraphs just materialized. Not bad for having nothing to write about. More tomorrow.

On “The Memex Method”

Sketch for a comic I may never make.

I’ve been a reader of Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic for about a year now. It’s one of my favorite blogs, covering a myriad of topics that range from DRM on refrigerators to Qanon Gamification and Vaccine Passports. I like to think of it as a daily dive into how strangely science-fiction our present day society has become.

Doctorow writes thoroughly and thoughtfully about every topic he tackles and he’s quite generous with links. Oftentimes a single blog post turns into an inter-textual reading extravaganza for me, akin to Wikipedia-surfing. I’m quite amazed at how he manages to do this daily (on top of all his other commitments—he’s published several books and graphic novels.) I’ve often wondered how it’s even possible.

Well, I just discovered an article called “The Memex Method” (looks like it was published just last week) where Doctorow lays out the hows and whys of his blogging habit and discusses its various advantages.

“Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys…

Like those family trip-logs, a web-log serves as more than an aide-memoire, a record that can be consulted at a later date. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

The other bit that struck me was how he likened it to Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” thought experiment (from the 1945 article, “As We May Think”) which outlines “a machine that serves to organize its user’s thoughts and semi-automatically bring related ideas together to help the user synthesize disparate insights and facts into new, larger works.”

I probably shouldn’t quote so much from the article but it was such an inspiring read that I want to note it down for future reference. You can read the rest of it HERE.

I really like the philosophy behind this, where the act of blogging has value in and of itself, rather than as a stepping stone to “building a brand” or “finding an audience.” I don’t know. I like the thought of having more readers but chasing them down is like putting the cart before the horse, you know? I started this blog six months ago as a reaction to all that social media toxicity, and I’m rather enjoying the calm of having a public notebook that doesn’t have all those built-in infinity pool hooks. I often have a fog in my brain and I find that writing for the sake of writing clears it out.

Warren Ellis described blogging as “leaving traces”—just putting stuff out there as a side-effect of engaging with ideas. Publishing as a way of thinking out loud. I’m still quite scattered in this regard, bouncing between YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, but as I move forward I’m hoping I’ll find my groove.

Anyway, this is all feeding into my Monday morning as I launch into some aggressive planning for the next few months, figuring out how to parse my next big project and really putting some thought into where all my time and attention should be going. Wishing you all a lovely week. See you on the next trace.