It’s strange that I have chosen Substack of all places to write this. I haven’t been active on here in just over two years because:
Mostly the stuckness
I lost access to my account for a while - not for any worrying reasons, I forgot my login details in a way that circumvented the forgot password route. Found them again though, yay.
Attempting to throw words around the shape of “stuck”…
Yeah, I’m really, really stuck. I’m going to attempt to throw some words1 around the shape of “stuck”.
A bunch of things have happened, none of which are good or bad necessarily but I’ve hit a huge creative wall, and I find it laughable that I have a post called “How to dismantle a creative wall” or something to that effect - fuck I’m so embarrassed looking at those posts now, who does that guy think he is? So pretentious, “hey, I never get stuck, just do these tricks” - man, I hate looking back at things I’ve made at the best of times, but the writing there in particular: who is that even for?
There was probably an ego-centric part of me that wanted to take the glory for getting a bunch of people unstuck and wanted recognition for being some sort of unsticking guru, and yet here he is now, capital “S” Stuck.
I’ll try to paint what this looks and/or feels like: chronic self-doubt in the thing that is supposed to come easily to you and creative flow bumps into something which seems like it’s in the head, like a heavy grey cloud that has a blocking texture to it, almost as though you could pay attention carefully and hear synapses (or whatever the correct medical term is) softly thudding into the side of it and the journey of that thing/idea/thought/potential ending there.
Note: here it is again, the stuckness is saying “this isn’t good, stop” and it’s taking all my might to see something through.
A lot of this has come from an internal feeling after lots of spiritual seeking, the fact that there isn’t really anything to say or worth saying. That I would only be adding to the meaningless bleating noises everyone else is making so why bother?
Untethered
In a lot of ways, it was easier to anchor myself to an identity or to anything when I knew less and didn’t absorb the patterns of how people do things. Even this post, I feel myself slipping into the usual pattern of “take a heading break here, structure it like you’re telling a story, and land it neatly” - I don’t want that. I don’t like structure, or having to perform a particular way, it’s so deeply not it.
The truest sense of me, and unimpeded creative flow was the 7 year old Jordan who would draw Sonic the Hedgehog comics for himself. He was the audience and the creator, and therefore the result was pure.
I am at a point in my life where the labelling function is making me tired and I feel untethered from being able to cling on to a thing like “company director”, “designer”, national identity etc. Untethered is the feeling of the rope breaking during a spacewalk and not being able to hook on to something to have a point of reference to understand yourself in your surroundings. “Untethered” not in the nice Untethered Soul way that I’m sure Michael Singer talks about in his book which I’m yet to read but will read some day.
Note: man, this is so drafty. The sentences aren’t even working together. Doesn’t matter, I’m hitting publish on something. As of this moment in time, I’m following whatever sense of creative flow there is, and it’s saying “journal here”, “tap a tuning fork and see who resonates” - love that phrase from Kevin Kwok.
So I guess if anything is to come of this, I’m going to try to lean into the draftyness, not get too caught up in what finished looks like because right now, it’s the enemy of any sense of creative flow/freedom, bleed a bit creatively and get comfortable with that, push publish before it’s ready a little more here because it seems in terms of a place to get short/medium/longform things out there with ease, it’s the most frictionless.
Again, that feels too structured and like I landed somewhat cleanly - nothing is resolved in terms of being stuck. There is a lot of freedom in a sharp, sudden ending like the conclusion of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) by The Beatles.
I like the phrase “throwing words around” something like you’re trying to lasso a description around something hard to describe in the usual fidelity in which you can describe most things in life. I enjoy ones that are hard to point to, such as this feeling.