Regarding actually finally figuring out what I've been building at Free Refills, rather than just talking about it.
The obvious answers are these: Read everything I've published. Because I never really did anything useful with categories, use tags liberally to try to discover patterns. Once I've read everything published, go back and explore all the zero drafts. From there, start grouping pieces thematically and chronologically.
But the "figure out how to get very clear" from Wednesday exists, I think, because I want to allow the means to achieve clarity to be non-obvious, though hopefully not in the way that what I've been building here remains non-obvious (in that I'm nearly three years in and still don't know exactly what it is).
I think my current frustration with my writing work and the role Free Refills plays in it stems substantially from essentially forgetting that at the start of this project, I gave myself full permission to not know what I was doing and, through that, welcome the possibility of happy accidents and surprise discoveries.
That I haven't figured it out, that I'm struggling to maintain momentum, that I treat the writing like a job but don't get paid for it--all of these have had me pretty down on myself. But I am right here going to suggest that maybe that's not fair to me. Because irrespective of the ultimate success or failure of this endeavor, I believed the project contained within it the seeds of insight, and I have been a stubborn motherfucker and I have simply never given up.
Sure, it's possible I've just been wrong and have refused to accept it. But I did--and do--feel like I went out on a limb with this project, and I've stuck with that belief, and so here I want to go against my usual self-excoriating tendencies and give myself a little high-five for being brave. I set out to battle giants. If they turned out to be nothing more than windmills, well, so be it. Call me a fool. But I also want to say this: there remains something brave and beautiful about refusing to simply see the world as everyone else declares it to be, and instead seeking something new.