Hello, Dreamwidth!

[brennanbrown]

It is four in the morning and I just changed my computer's timezone to Pago Pago—America Samoa. This is UTC -11 hours. It is the absolute earliest measured time in the world, always. I do this when it is late at night and I haven't written my entry for the day on 750words. It is cheating, or at the very least, it is the hubris of time travel.

But this is how the writing gets done. The streak is maintained (445 days as of right now) and I am motivated to continue. I would rather cheat and continue writing than play honest and fair and become disinterested after failure. Isn't that interesting?
 

Enough preamble. Hello, hi. My name is Brennan, though during university I went by my middle name Kenneth because people often spelled and pronounced my name wrong (Brennon, Brennen, Brendan). I like both names a lot, Kenneth was the name of my grandfather who was an artist.

I recently wrote about Dreamwidth and sonder on my main blog, and I realize I want a different modality of writing. More intimate and messy and private but not wholly private. And it's difficult for me, I am terrible at nuance, can't you tell?

Okay, enough tongue-in-cheek. I want to journal publicly. I want to allow myself to freewrite and not worry about having a thesis and to have a tidy container of an essay at the end that I can monetize on Medium.com and bastardize my art by turning it into capital. I want to write more about the boring, about the personal, venting and ranting and freebleeding on the page.

But this does not mean you are getting the real Brennan. I'm not going to pretend that's how it works. You just get a different Brennan.

What I actually struggle with is performance. Or rather, the fact it is inescapable. Being the raw and real version of yourself, being vulnerable and "unmasking" doesn't lead to a face, it just leads to a different kind of mask. Maybe this new mask resembles the face more, but we cannot escape performance. There is no default us, there is no static us. There are so many complex systems of biology and neurology and sociology informing our personhood. Our consciousness is an elegant and convincing hallucination which fit us for evolutionary survive and continuance. We are as dynamic and fleeting as a forest fire when the rain comes in.

I will tell you, if it's consolation, that I won't be editing. No matter how much a sentence makes me cringe or how much I regret writing it out, it stays. I think that's a good rule.

I hope to make friends, to be honest. I hope to find people who I can talk to in longform conversation. I am in incredible solitude. Despite my productivity with writing, I still am functionally agoraphobic, rarely leaving my home. My productivity is actually just well-channelled compulsion, but I'll certainly take it.

When I was running a creative writing collective, I remember time and time again people saying they couldn't find the motivation to write, or that they didn't think they were good enough to start. (Look, nobody is good in the beginning! And if you wait for inspiration, it might come in with the tides, but so much time will be wasted by not creating.) Maybe I have a distorted bias because I've been surrounded by writers more than other creatives, but I feel like writers uniquely have a subculture of not-writing. The act of not-writing is a shared grievance and humour and just an accepted-fact.

I contemplate this daily before my freewriting session, like a heavy stone I press against my chest which I'm allergic to. It feeds the compulsion, which in turn feeds the writing, which in turn literally feeds me. Hurray!

Spite is an extremely powerful motivator but it is such a balancing act to channel it properly. It can be as dense and dark as Texas crude oil. My prolific, industrious streak is revenge on those who said I would never be able to!

Hm, not a very good first impression. Whoops. Anyways, I have been blogging for half a year at Brennan.day if you'd like to read some of my work. I do wonder what people think of me, writing 300,000 words in half a year. I know the answer, people do not think much of me at all. We are all to preoccupied with how other people think about us. Heh.

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Comments

[osteophage]

Welcome to Dreamwidth, Brennan! I think it can be good to have different outlets for different kinds of writing, or writing at different stages, or however you want to think about it. Let me know if you have any questions about how this site works. You might also want to check out newcomers or getting_started.

[brennanbrown]

Thank you for the warm welcome, Coyote! I owe a lot of my IndieWeb journey to you, so thank you. And you write such interesting, smart stuff too. :) I look forward to reading yr recent post on Severance.