Free Refills

One morning, I rode my bike to my favorite Boulder coffeehouse to write, and on my bike ride over I was thinking about the work I was planning on doing. I had this image of sitting down and getting right to work.

Instead, I procrastinated. And that struck me as interesting. In my zero draft from that day, I wrote this: "What happened this morning when I intended to write and I thumbed through a magazine for a half-hour?"

That led to some interesting thoughts:

I wonder, now that I reflect on it, if the thinking/anticipating is another practice I've learned to do in order to not feel. If perhaps I am creating within my head a visualized experience of what the work is going to look like, and using that imagination as a way to avoid feeling what's happening right in the moment.

It struck me as a startling insight.

This has thus far been a very challenging week. I've really struggled with the transition back into my regular life from my time away.

So as we step into the discussion of the challenge of transitioning between not-writing and writing, these twin aspects combine into our jumping-off point. I'll articulate it as a question: When facing something that's making the writing difficult (e.g. this week's fatigue), does an imagined (positive, always positive) idea of how the work will go get in the way of actually meeting the moment?

The daily transition from not-writing to writing is one I've struggled with for years, and based on questions my clients have asked, I'm clearly not the only one. My zero drafts on the subject have led me to some interesting places, and I'm hoping this week to publish a piece or two about what I've discovered.

But today, alas, the salient transition is from hard-drinking, minimal-sleeping vacation back to normal life, and boy oh boy is that proving to be a harder transition than I had planned.

In the piece I published here about procrastination, I asserted that procrastination serves as a means to avoid feeling the uncomfortable feelings that arise around trying to do creative work.

So my question today: is it still called procrastination if the feeling you are trying to avoid is that of your sleep-deprived, recently booze-soaked brain trying to re-expand back into its normal shape inside your skull?

I will here propose that there may be a certain utility in choosing not to feel certain things.

(Uggh.)

Next time I choose to flagellate my brain in this manner, please remind me to schedule a vacation day to recover from my vacation.

Once you unpack "blog" even a little, all sorts of problems fall out.

For starters, it's a corruption of "weblog," and right there you're replacing a compound metaphor for a nonsense syllable. And "weblog" is itself a corrupting contraction of either "web-log" or "web log," and I assert smashing those two words together conceals some useful information.

So let's take them apart. For simplicity I'm willing to accept "web" as effectively synonymous with "Internet," though if I am here making a close examination of words to see what we can learn, I have to point out that "web" is less synonym than subset. And certainly "web" and "Internet" do considerably different things, serve different connotative purposes.

And "log" comes to us from nautical terminology, meaning the place in which the daily technical details of the journey get recorded. In most cases when you try to draw the correlation between "log" and the kind of writing we're talking about, it's not accurate at all. It's a lazy metaphor. In most cases, "journal" would be far more accurate, but even that's not really right most of the time, not connotatively anyway, because "journal" implies "daily writing about the day itself," and that's not what I nor just about anyone is publishing on their so-called blogs.

Now I do recognize that "journal" comes etymologically from the Latin diurnalis by way of Old French and means "daily," and I am publishing daily, so this is a journal in the same way that some newspapers call themselves journal. I can accept that, but it's only accurate as far as it goes, and that's really not very far.

My point in all of this is that the things we call things matter. Words tell stories, and you don't have to go to the lengths I've gone to here to pick up a lot of that. Blog tells an attenuated, inaccurate story, and says it with a sneer. I refuse to saddle work I take seriously with such a term.

I still don't know what to call this thing now that I'm refusing anymore to call it a blog. On the other hand, I will take a moment to point out that if you're actually paying attention to the peculiarly writerly craziness I've got on display right now, you might be catching a glimmer of some of what I've got packed into the name Free Refills, and I promise you that it is zero percent an accident.

You know what? I'm done blogging. I'm not doing it anymore.

Oh, I'm still gonna publish here Monday through Friday, just like I've been doing. I'm still gonna write about the stuff I've been writing about.

But this is not a blog. I work hard on the pieces here. I have no idea what I'm doing in the grand scheme of things, but I'm showing up every day and trying to publish something worthwhile, and wrapped up in the word "publish" are other words like "write" and "edit" and definitely "craft."

And let's not forget words like "fear."

And certainly we mustn't forget "expansion."

But I sure as fuck am not gonna put all that energy into writing and editing and contemplating and crafting and putting it out there for the world to see--again, let's wrap all those words up into the single word, "publishing"--and then denigrate my efforts by calling this thing a blog.

Words have energy. Blog simply screams "derision," and I'm not going to let a bunch of inconsiderate assholes (meaning the people who coined and popularized that hideous word) force me to deride work I actually take a lot of pride in.

This is not a blog. Until someone comes up with a word that doesn't suck, I'm not blogging. I'm publishing my writing on my website. It's totally different.

I feel so strongly about this that I'm going to make it its own post:

I hate the word blog.

I fucking hate the word blog.

Working hard to craft a piece of writing and then calling the thing you publish it on a blog is exactly like getting dressed up for a night out in your finest clothes, the ones you feel super-sexy and crazy-confident in, the ones that elevate your carriage so much that heads turn everywhere you go, and then once you're totally put together and everything is just so and you're feeling really sharp, squatting down and shitting yourself.

Yesterday I described noticing a new feeling in my body during my zero-drafting, and that when I examined that feeling I discovered it was distrust. I wasn't trusting the quality of either the content or the prose in my zero drafts. Yesterday I explored the significance of not trusting the content. Today I'll talk about not trusting the prose.

It's interesting to note that I teach the zero-drafting process as one in which you can set prose quality and even grammar aside. You can fix all those issues in edits and rewrites. And yet I discover that I'm worried that by following that process, I'm producing inferior work.

Isn't that strange? What am I therefore not seeing?

I think, first of all, that I'm comparing myself subconsciously to the literature that taught me to love writing. That's an honest enough mistake; we all seek to emulate our heroes. Nevertheless, once I noticed it, I had to point out to myself: I'm not writing literature. This is not a novel, nor is it meant to be. Fiction and non-fiction have different goals and different ways of achieving them. Here, I'm trying to offer something immediately valuable from my recent experiences, to say it clearly and concisely, and to say it publicly, on a set schedule.

I mustn't underestimate just how important that last point is.

There's no need to make simple things complicated. Right now, the place where I am stretching, where I am seeking improvement, isn't so much in the sentences themselves. I'm not asserting that there isn't plenty of room for improvement, but I have done enough writing that I've achieved a certain level of competency. Most of the time, I can just write and trust that when the words flow quickly and cleanly, my years of practice are ensuring that I'm writing with clarity and maybe even a bit of music. I've developed some technique over the years. What's the value of technique if you can't trust it?

I admit it appeals to my ego to write in the equivalent of switch double-cork 1080s fifteen feet above the rim of the half-pipe, but sometimes the right choice is to just carve smooth esses to the bottom of the slope. I forget sometimes that there's a beauty in effectiveness and simplicity.

Where I have held back, where I haven't pushed myself, is in getting the work out there. I'm still committed to publishing every Monday through Friday, and that's still plenty hard for me. I've found a bunch of ways to procrastinate so far this week. That says I'm scared, still. So here is where I most need to improve. Here is where I need to develop my technique. This is the place where I'm at my limits.

I felt my ego relax a little when I told it, "Let simple things be simple. Dig deeper when it's necessary. Trust that you've put in the hours to be able to tell the difference."

Not long ago I picked up on a new feeling in my body during my daily zero-drafting practice. It was a discomfort that I wasn't especially familiar with, not during writing anyway, and I was ultimately able to place it as distrust. I didn't trust my zero drafts.

I've been preaching their utility for years, and so as you might imagine this was a very uncomfortable realization indeed.

I asked myself, What do I mean, exactly, when I feel I don't trust the zero drafts?

It was clear enough: I felt on some level that the rapidity with which I was writing meant that I was neither adequately exploring the topic at hand, nor putting in sufficient effort into the quality of expression itself.

This weekend I had a bit of a download, and those issues came into much clearer focus.

Today I'll speak to my concern about the former, that my exploration of the topic is inadequate.

I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff. That just seems to be how my mind works and it's probably unlikely to change. Earlier today, I was reading a prior zero draft on the subject of not trusting the practice, and in it I concluded, "I can probably safely assume that I'm rarely writing about something that I haven't considered at all."

That's a pretty good point.

I think the point actually extends more deeply than that, too. I preach that the zero draft process will directly show you the clarity of your own thinking.

Sometimes in a zero draft the essence of my thinking will flow from my fingers without difficulty. In that instance, I discover I already know what I think on the subject. The writing is then a body practice to bring that understanding out into the world.

On the other hand, as I have noted many times in this blog, zero-drafting is an excellent technique for when you know you want to say something, but you don't know exactly what it is. So write. Say anything.

And when I later read over writing done in that energy, I always discover that either I did or did not say something interesting. I either did or did not reach a better clarity of thinking. If I said something interesting or useful, well then: success. If not, then I've just learned that there's still more exploration to do.

From that perspective, in either case the experiment has performed admirably, hasn't it?

(This is probably not the entertaining story my poker buddies were expecting when they saw me editing at the table earlier tonight.)

I have dealt with a generalized anhedonia for much of my adult life, but in late 2013 and early 2014, I sank into a profound depression. (There were reasons for it. For the sake of this story the reasons don't matter.) I was clinically depressed and struggling deeply and at its worst it hurt like nothing else has ever hurt and as I was watching the damage it was doing in my life and the struggle to move forward at all, I decided the time had come to explore a route I had long rejected. I'm lucky enough to have insurance, I figured. I might as well see what modern psychiatry has to offer.

The psychiatrist was a nice woman from India with that typically lovely Subcontinental musical accent. She listened politely, asked questions about the recent events of my life and the symptoms I'd been facing, and then, to no surprise to me, offered me an SSRI, either Zoloft or Paxil, I don't remember which. She explained that the drug's mechanism meant that, best case, I could expect relief in about two weeks, but that for most people it takes some adjustment of the dosage level, so it's usually about six weeks before the doctors get everything dialed in, and I'd experience the drug's benefits. At that point I'd continue taking the drug for time indeterminate.

She admitted that, yes, there are side effects. I don't recall that she went into particular detail about them, but she gave me a four- or five-page printout about the drug that told me everything I'd want to know.

The list of side effects was substantial, and they weren't minor league. Common side effects from SSRIs include headaches, nausea, drowsiness in some cases and insomnia in others, weight gain, increased anxiety, and loss of sex drive.

I knew all of that going in, of course. I also knew that millions of people have found SSRIs to be helpful in their lives, and I was in a place where the storm was raging hard enough that I didn't have the luxury to not at least cast a glance at every available mooring.

At this point it became a question of risk-reward. And there was another factor I had to take into account.

I've been a recreational user of marijuana since my mid-twenties. (Yes, a few years after college.) Every few weeks, I'd smoke a Friday night bowl and dissolve into the revelatory pleasures of whatever media I chose to consume that night.

In other words, getting high was fun.

But it was only over the past four or five years that I became aware of something interesting: while I often experienced a definite hungover lack-of-mental-acuity the day after smoking, my mood remained elevated, and it would stay elevated for days. There didn't appear to be any subsequent comedown. As medium-term side effects go, I was pretty much a fan.

That fall and winter, getting high still felt good. It offered me substantial and essentially immediate relief from the pain of deep depression. The effect didn't always linger as it had in the past, but sometimes I stayed feeling better for several days.

Given those experiences, I had to ask some questions.

First of all, given the circumstances I was facing, was long-term intervention the right approach? Of course trusting the solid rationality of your thinking is a bit perilous when in the throes of depression, but it seemed to me that perhaps depression of a sort wasn't an entirely inappropriate response to my situation. It occurred to me (and I think this still) that depression might not always be a bad thing, per se. Depression might sometimes be a message your body is trying to send you about your circumstances. Hurting constantly gives a strong impetus to change.

I also believed that healing would eventually come, if I could just get through.

But I don't mean to downplay the immediate need for help. This wasn't simple anhedonia, where life goes on and you just deal with it. Here there were days when I couldn't get out of bed. There were days when I got caught in loops of thought and though I could watch the loops and witness their spinning convolutions, I could not escape them, and it hurt and hurt and hurt.

Psychiatrists, and the pharmaceutical companies whom they essentially serve, put a handsome chrome gleam on SSRIs: NO MORE DEPRESSION, they promise seductively. They downplay the side effects, but they essentially ignore the most troubling thing of all: something you have to take every single day or else it fucks up your whole world? That's an addiction. That a doctor gives her sweetly musical imprimatur to that addiction doesn't make it any less so. Of course, a drug addiction might be preferable to depression. That's what I'd gone to the doctor to try to figure out.

So here was the calculus as I saw it: if I went with the SSRI, it would take two to six weeks or more before I saw any relief. There would likely be side effects. And I would be dependent on that drug for, in the best case, a long long time.

Alternately, I could use marijuana. Marijuana relieved my depressive symptoms immediately. While I was high, it gave me an immediate boost of energy, and brought some pleasure into my life.

Now, from that perspective--from treating marijuana as medicine--marijuana had one obvious and not insubstantial negative side effect, which is that it's intoxicating. There's a reason stoners aren't usually thought of as world beaters. Sure, it can engender a space of deep creativity, but in my experience the concomitant degradation of technique generally overwhelms whatever inspiration the drug offers. As with most people, pot makes me a little stupid. So writing and other complicated abstract tasks became out of the question.

But on the other hand, if I otherwise wasn't going to be getting out of bed, well, I wasn't going to be getting much writing done in that case either. At least if I got high I'd feel better and have some energy. I could do things around the house. Dishes and laundry got done. Clutter got put away. I could go outside and go for a walk. My day would be better than it was going to be otherwise.

And if the next day I felt that I could face the day without it, I didn't need to take it.

And on those days that I did need it, it was a godsend.

And once I started treating cannabis like a medicine, the question became, "How do I minimize the side effects? What is the smallest effective dose?" I experimented. How little could I take to get sufficient relief from my depressive symptoms while minimizing the intoxication? Over time the dose got smaller and smaller.

And eventually time went on and I made other changes in my life and slowly the depression lifted, and I could just go back to smoking weed for the fun of it like a normal person.

Why am I telling this story? Well, today is 4/20, the day most closely associated with stoner culture, and while every passing day that culture becomes more acceptable in our society (if no less worthy of a certain mockery), I want to raise my voice in support of this other aspect of the plant's use. I have been opposed to the Drug War since I was old enough to say, "Wait. Didn't we try this before? Didn't we call it Prohibition and didn't it make things much worse than the problem it was purporting to cure?" But between the noise of the 4/20 crowd on the one side and the "Drugs are bad" crowd on the other, there might not be much room for other voices to be heard. Cannabis helped me when I needed help the most. It's hideous that the drug that demands habitual use is the one the government makes easier to use. So on this colorfully noisy day, I am speaking up.

I know there a lot of people out there joyfully toking up around the country today, and good for them, and I hope they have a great time and bop their heads pleasurably to music and watch endless episodes of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and eat the entire bag of Fritos, and I hope that some of them are maybe taking a minute to thank the drug for the fun it provides. For my part, I will offer my gratitude to its ability to deflect the states of profound Not Fun I found myself in. I'm glad and a bit lucky to still be here to be able to share this story, and I will give credit where it is due.

(Still more thoughts about writing about writing.)

Ultimately, I don't intend to be writing about writing for very long. The most interesting thing that's happened in these pieces has been that regularly the piece starts as writing about writing but finishes somewhere deeper, more universal: I've written about about fear, about energy flow, about perfectionism, about expansion instead of contraction. It's like I'm starting by walking down a wide, bright hallway, off of which dimly lit corridors stretch in myriad directions. It's not always obvious where they lead.

I'll keep walking the wide hallway so long as I keep ending up in other, unexpected places.

More thoughts on the possible value of writing about writing.

Naked Ambition

I've started coaching a few writers with their projects. I'm enjoying it, and my clients are telling me that I'm really helping them. I know already that I'd like to cultivate a more substantial clientele. These pieces say something about my credentials. "Let me tell you some things I've learned about writing."

Reflections on Living the Experiment

One of the features of this writing experiment is to trust that it's productive to look directly at my life for material to write about. And right now the experiment itself, especially what I'm discovering through the process of daily publishing, is a major feature of my life. In spaces of risk and growth, self-doubt is likely, self-exploration necessary, and self-reflection productive. Writing is often planting seeds; this is bound to be fertile ground for them to grow.