Maia Nebula!

I am not an employee, but, like many people with regular office jobs, I got to enjoy a few days of well-deserved rest at the end of the year. Now I’m sort of dreading coming back to work. The ball’s already in motion, though: boring tasks, unexpected to-do’s, confounding correspondence, surprise events.

These first few days of the year I was able to enjoy the rare gift of clarity, knowing exactly how I wanted to spend my time and doing exactly that. Now I’m scared of losing that luxury. Of course, I could always scrape up odd bits of time and pour them into my preferred activities, but there’s always the potential for doomscrolling.

What I’m starting to see, though, is how easy it is to just keep a tab open with a running draft and returning to it whenever I start to feel a certain level of mental pushback to continuing work. This is going to be my grounding space. And if I lose my way for good and never make it back to what I’m supposed to be doing, at least I’ll have something to show for it.

Over the past few days, I’ve developed an urge to write. I have no idea what about—it just feels imperative. Is this what I used to feel when I was younger and used to write all the time? There used to be things simmering in my head constantly, words clamoring to be poured out, laid down like rows of bricks: walls for posterity. Something that says: This used to be my mind on a certain day. This is a snapshot of me.

Actually, this is not a spontaneous occurrence. I didn’t just wake up one day cured of all self-consciousness, ready to take on my good old blogs and open my heart to the void. What happened is that life sent a messenger my way in the form of a facilitator at a series of work events. We built rapport over our breaks, and at some point he mentioned a book he had recently read: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. I made a mental note to pick it up, as it seemed to me a good conversation starter for a future encounter. Was I in for a revelation.

I haven’t finished it yet, but what I’ve read so far has blown my mind. Every belief I had regarding my artistic output has been put into question. If I’m not willing to lay my heart, brain and liver on a rock under the sun for everyone to see, I might as well go seek a different endeavor, for an artist I am not. To me, that means returning to this website. This continuous series of writing exercises in two languages. This hall of mundane dioramas. I’ve been wasting precious time, letting gold nuggets slip off my fingers by refusing to acknowledge that this is not supposed to be a perfect compendium of immaculate prose on groundbreaking thoughts. I spent years, years! convinced that I was all out of ideas and therefore had nothing to write about. The few times I still tried, I was bogged down by the delusion that I had both infinite time and an obligation to polish every single idea before committing it to text, and to polish every single written sentence before moving on to the next. I inevitably let the flame peter out, defeated by the insurmountability of my own impossible system and then seduced by the numbing comfort of social media. That’s how I accumulated an astonishing number of unpublished drafts.

A week on a remote island with very little contact with the online world put the finishing touches on this new version of me. I am no longer distracted by the incoming noise. I can hear my thoughts, and I no longer care if they’re worth writing or not. That’s totally beside the point. The idea is to come back to this wall of words in the future and contemplate these mementoes of who I once was. All of this is a gift for me.

Sometimes I wish—a little too fervently, perhaps—that I could bookmark all the great insights I’ve stumbled upon in my life. I wish I could track down the exact point of inception of a positive change. A new habit adopted. Some random post on social media that got me thinking.

No one has confirmed this, but I believe this is actually a manifestation of some form of anxiety. There is no such thing as this much control over one’s life. I know that. And yet, there’s this part of me that craves it.

The worst part of this is knowing how fleeting change can be. You can always fall back into bad habits. In fact, you’re almost guaranteed to do so, because life will always be throwing punches at you, challenging you in ways you didn’t expect.

However, not all is lost. Even when you feel slipping back into your old ways, something sticks from your attempt at improving, even if only a little discomfort. You’re actually not the same as before—you cannot bear to be. You will try again.

So there is no single point of inception, I guess, but rather a series of small incremental ones, until at long last the desired change sticks for good.

I’m looking forward to that outcome. Obsessing over points of inception makes no sense without the outcome. The origin of nothing means nothing.

Here’s to the future—one where I’m proud of the discipline I’ve built. Let’s call this post the point of inception.