Escape Hatch

By building an escape hatch while writing, I increased the odds that I would be more likely to use my escape hatch.

I’m fighting demons.

I find it easy to write about my life but flinch at mining the personal for material. In this lies a tension as I try to write outside my google docs and more online this month.

Yesterday, instead of writing something about myself or harder, writing something I cared about, I attempted to write a short sci fi which warped into a long foot note, before the whole thing floated off like a dry moth.

In trying to think of a topic to write yesterday that wasn’t meta and too personal, I wanted to try to write fiction, which is a different style than I usually write.

I told myself it was a challenge, but deep down I was giving myself a soft landing. If I didn’t like how the piece turned out, I was just trying a new style.

Building an escape hatch while writing, I increased the odds that I would be more likely to use my escape hatch. The hatch was faulty, of course.

I can’t lie to myself. I can’t unsee myself from my self. I so often clearly see what I am doing, but just a bit too late. (I’m learning to learn from those a bit too lates though.)

I used to day dream about the earthquake coming so we could finally build something cool. I would imagine an early warning alarm system, even build it in my head to ensure the city was empty, and then I would think of different types of materials we could use to build things.

I would think about what the city would be reshaped like and I would think about what it would sound like while it was being rebuilt and I would imagine it could be quiet instead of loud and try to think of different ways to build construction quietly.

And sometimes I would think about using semiconductor technology to rebuild cities, because chips are small and buildings are big and I like juxtapositions. I don’t really care about thinking about the differences in photolithography and stereolithography anymore. If I cared enough about it I would just go work on it.

And a doesn’t fully care, always comes though. Hard to hide.

There was a heart behind the wall I could have pulled from. If I wanted to show a care:

I could have written, about what it felt like for me to think I found my thing, bend my life upside down for it, and then realize it didn’t fit my belief system anymore.

I could have written, about the tug I feel about wanting to have a me shaped problem.

I could have written, about how I wonder if people have different operating systems than me? There seems to be a lot of people who are fine to murk up their values in exchange for money or fun or sport. I can see how people can justify it when things can look like good in a narrow way, but not look good in the broader way.

I feel somewhat similar about writing about personal things. It narrowly feels good. I think people would like to read it and I would write well, but in a broader way it seems not great for me. I think there is a real cost there. I can see the price, both in what is left on the table and the tax on that purchase.

(*editors note: internal openness is not exactly the type of personal material I have trouble publishing. there is an different set of writing which is more about weaving different experiences together, and sharing short vignettes on the world, that I really enjoy writing. but it feels distasteful to be like my life is awesome and like selling out my own memories to share them for consumption and cool points. because writing at its bastardization is about being cool, whether you want to acknowledge it or not)

When I see writers write from the chest, it seems brave to me. They pull their thoughts outside their minds and then put it in a medium to enter another person’s mind, and then that person is then perceiving words but also YOU. But they’re not perceiving the real you. They’re perceiving the words strung together in a sequence version of you. But… there is no realness property. The string of words, is also real.

I see both the impulse towards openness and privacy as similarly destructive.

Towards which delenda est do i steer