For a few days now, maybe even the past week or two, I’ve felt a kind of malaise and/or lethargy… perhaps more of spirit than of action. For me it’s been most noticeable in my writing, or lack thereof. It’s been difficult to write every day. Something in the feedback loop feels off. I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to analyze what’s different, just a cautious observation. Or more accurately, if I’ve spent time analyzing, I’ve been unable or unwilling to write about it.
There is, for sure, a pulling back. I can’t tell whether or not this is just part of the natural ebb and flow of life and emotion or if it is a “new phase.” When I get stuck like this, I tend to resort to lists, because the connective tissue is elusive.
Readership
My ex-fiancee used to read my blog. For a while the guy she was dating did too. There were weird moments after they broke up in which everyone was in contact – not prolonged contact – an email or two. He was offering a type of comradeship “yeah, she said all of those things to me too.” I have good reason to believe that she stopped reading a while ago and perhaps he did too. In the long run, that is probably the healthiest thing for everyone. I read a post the other day that said a person dies twice – the first is the physical and the second is when their name is no longer mentioned. I can’t rule out that some of what I feel is a type of second death of that relationship. She was the one that left. As the person who waited, I was almost fated to be the one to watch it all play out in slow motion.
Quality / Inspiration
Of course the readership aspect has an impact on writing – as much as I’ve tried to behave as though I don’t care who is in the audience, it’s nearly impossible, for me, to be 100% free of that concern/awareness. But, I’ve also been facing the challenge of my own internal critic. I’m nearly done the collection of memoir-style essays on poetry by Stephen Dunn. It’s been a really good read…. but somewhere along the way, the inspiration turned to deflation. The last few essays still get plenty of underlines, but they are not sending me running to my computer or notebook to jot down ideas. I have a suspicion that this too is tied to my own sense of my audience or my own need to share. I read a lot of different things. Essays on poetry, relationships, culture, etc. Usually, I try to incorporate those things in to what I’m writing. Just recently I read an article on Marriage 101 a course offered at Northwestern (it reinforced much of what I believe is important to be successful in a relationship). I’m also part way through an article on the end of productivity (suggesting that the pandemic may finally break us of our link between productivity and status). These would both be topics for blog posts by me, and yet….
Being for vs. Being Against vs. Insecurity
I hinted that I was thinking about our current use of influencers in marketing. I spent a little bit of time scrolling through LinkedIn this morning and came across a connection (one I don’t particularly care for). He is very much about promoting himself and his personal brand. His face is on billboards everywhere as you drive in or out of Philly. This particular LinkedIn video post was unveiling that his company now has a studio/van and will come to your city… of course his image is the most noticeable thing on the van. As I continued scrolling, I came across another video from a guy that I had a few meetings with a number of years ago. At the time, he was a community relations officer for a small community bank. He now works for the company of the first guy I just mentioned. He too is all about putting out his own brand – as best as I can tell, his video had nothing to do with his company or his work. I then came across a post from a woman who works for United Way here in Memphis. I don’t know her all that well. I reached out when I first got here. Much of what she posts seems to be about things other than her United Way work. In this realm, I feel pretty inadequate. I am not about self promotion, yet, I often think I’d like to be a full-time consultant (which requires a lot of self-promotion). I think I will expand this paragraph in to a full-blown post. Suffice it to say, as I immerse myself in this world of marketing, branding, and self-promotion, I feel a little dirty going back and writing anything personal – it all just makes me want to disappear and only work from behind the scenes.
Social Life
I don’t know what impact this has had on my writing or desire to write. I can only say that I suspect one needs to have balance in life: A good blend of solitude and social living. The few new friends that I’ve made over the past few months have all gotten busy with life (mostly they’ve all started dating people). It’s to be expected that at the beginning of a relationship, peripheral relationships get pruned or ignored. I know I’ve been guilty of that in the past – my ex-friend Jen pointed that out to me just before we stopped being friends (though she did not own that she also had started a new relationship and had done the same thing). When they work, relationships and friendships are all two-way streets. Sometimes, they become one-way and one person does all of the outreach, sometimes, they just go quiet for a bit. Lately, I’ve done most of the outreach with my newer friends. Things that we might have done as friends, they are now doing with their romantic interest. I don’t begrudge them that.
Dating
About two weeks ago I started texting with one or two women that I met through a dating site. I seem unable to sustain these conversations. Which is a very weird feeling for me. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s sustaining a conversation. This was never an issue before – or if it was, it was isolated to one or two instances. Now, it seems to happen almost every time. Admittedly, I sometimes struggle to bring adequate enthusiasm to the conversation, or to even asking a person out. For now it looks and sounds like “hey, I’m thinking of doing x, care to join me?” I’m not sure I can muster up more than that. Which of course goes back to that two-way street concept. Being a bit on the shy side to begin with, I tend to do better with slightly more aggressive/forward women – or ones who show a clear interest in me… do I have a secret need to be chased? People feed off of each other, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a negative way. It had been a while since I bothered to strike up a conversation with anyone. I can’t tell if this is simply a sign that I’m not ready or if maybe there’s mutual disinterest – and I use that term in a neutral way, as in there could be interest but we can’t seem to get past an Eeyore phase. Either way, something feels off and/or broken.
Work
I consulted with two nonprofits yesterday – both on a volunteer basis. I also spent some time thinking about how I could get paid to volunteer. I know, that makes no sense. These organizations can’t typically afford to hire consultants. When they do, they don’t always get what they need. They are able to get volunteers, but often, those people don’t treat it like a job and the effort is sometimes not what it needs to be. It makes sense, in a weird way, that the consultant would raise the funds from a third party so as not to put any additional burden on the nonprofit. In the one instance, I was pretty negative in my evaluation of the project. I was trying to find a polite way to tell the executive director that they are not where they need to be in order to solicit the types of funding he thinks they should get. Internally, my gut was questioning if this was even a legitimate organization (I came across some news articles from two years ago that would indicate they are). He’s asked me to write up my thoughts and some next steps for him (what I consider to be good housekeeping) so that he might be in a position to solicit funds. The other consult is to review some thank you letters and stewardship documents to help an organization streamline their process. They are fairly sophisticated, and we’ve agreed to work together… None of this will help me pay my bills, but in the overall process of talking with these folks I realized I don’t care all that much if I got paid. I’m happy to help if I can…. which ultimately leads me back to being a consultant and finding ways to promote what I can do for other people.
There are days when I feel like having so much uncertainty might just drive me nuts. It’s hard to know how any of this impacts the other aspects of my life. The other day I joked with my dad about how swimmingly life is going – no job, no friends, no romantic interest in the middle of a pandemic. This was, of course, before a black man was choked out by a police officer and another black man had the cops called on him by a hysterical white woman… perspective.
Two nights ago I had a disturbing dream. I can’t remember any of the details. I think my ex-fiancee and I were giving it another go and she was leaving again, or something like that. I had the dream before midnight, so I was a little less groggy than usual when I woke from it. There was a slight smell of burning toast (but no actual burning toast)… I don’t know where I heard this, but when I woke up and had that smell, I immediately looked it up because I could swear I heard it’s what people smell before a stroke or something like that. What then freaked me out was reading, “There’s a popular myth that smelling burnt toast is a sign of a brain tumor, or that you’re having a stroke.” Myth or not, I was kinda disturbed. I only remembered all of this yesterday when I opened the browser on my phone to see a page about smelling burning toast being a medical condition…
I don’t know what to make of any of this. And so a list… something that maybe I can come back to and expand upon or just leave here and move on to whatever comes next. I have some “work” to do – I have a second round job interview on Friday and need to submit to them thoughts on a development plan. I promised I’d get my thoughts of in an email to the nonprofit in Camden. I’m behind on my course on content marketing, and I can’t decide if I should be pursuing some sort of freelance/consulting gig. All of those things have also hit home just how hard it would be to focus on writing as a spare-time endeavor. And maybe that’s the real root of any malaise – knowing that it’s all just a distraction and a bit of self-delusion.