The Receding Horizon

So far, one of the most difficult parts about being in your forties and discovering that you have autism is figuring out how to decipher whether certain behaviors are the quirks of being an autistic or just the quirks of being a human being. After a year, I still find myself saying “it’s probably because I’m autistic” far more than I like. But, the reality is, this is a coping mechanism; a way of incorporating the revelation into my understanding of myself. So, forgive as I say:

Likely because of my autism, I have mental blocks.

For example, my original intentions with Dispatches From Creative Isolation was to turn back time and use it as a personal blog in the manner of the early days of blogging. Something more a kin to LiveJournal or Tumblr than Medium or…well…Substack. Blogging was always exciting to me because it was intended to be raw communication. There was no thought about what time you posted, or typos, and “creating a brand.” It was just a bunch of weirdos, nerds, outsiders, and explorers opening themselves up to the world. There was no subject matter other than the person. Justin’s blog did have a genre or category, It was just Justin. Aurelia wrote about whatever Aurelia wanted to write about. Sometimes the posts were short. Sometimes the were long. Sometimes there were six-seven posts a day, and sometimes a month would go by without a word. (The concept of regularly scheduled programming didn’t come around until the algorithms.)

This is what I wanted Dispatches to be. That’s why I named it that. And somewhere along the way I fell short. I got caught worrying about open rate, and even more worried about annoying people. It seems obvious, but this was a symptom of an insecurity that the modern internet has imposed upon us. We are all entertainers. We are all marketers. We are all sales people. We are building, maintaining, and growing audiences. We are talking to people any more. We are opening ourselves up.

I’m sick of it. I’m over the idea of publishing videos because it’s been a week. I’m tired of having to read social media posts when I’d rather be reading a book; when I’d be better served reading books. I’m tired of Instagram as a whole. But mostly I’m tired squeezing between imaginary boundaries.

YET, here’s the funny part. I can do it on Substack. Which is not to say Substack won’t let me, or it’s not capable of it—rather what I mean is, I have mental block. I just can’t get myself to do it there. Which is why you’re seeing this.

I hope you don’t mind.

I imported my list of all of you over to BeeHiiv. It’s just another newsletter service (though I’m kind of in love with the way I’ve been able to design the look of the emails compared to Substack.) My plan is three fold:

1. Use BeeHive to communicate in all the ways I‘ve described above. Raw. Eclectically. Honestly. At my whim.

2. Continue to use Substack for videos (along with X and possibly, Rumble. I choose these three because they support free speech, which is incredibly important to me, even if I do not record anything that threatens mine.) (Oh, and I’ve started using YouTube to archive old video, but I purposely keep that platforms 4-5 videos behind all the others.)

3. Post videos (podcasts) as I have been recently: Raw. Eclectically. Honestly. At my whim.

The concept of Creative Isolation is an acknowledgement that thinking deeply, and writing requires distance and solitude and uninterrupted flow. Social media, and the pump pump pump schedule of “building a brand” is not conducive to that.

Writers such as Steven King, Zadie Smith, and Ernest Hemingway talked about killing your darlings. The concept being that the things you write suffer when you hold on to sentences/paragraphs/pages that you over value. You become blind to how they weigh down your story because you feel so clever having written them.

If we must kill our darlings, then imaging how ruthless we must be with the obstacles and detours in our path.

My striving for this isolation often feels like a horizon that continual recedes. Yet, the further towards it I march, the more I evade the things that hold me back.

Oh, I almost forgot. Feel free to unsubscribe if this all sounds like nonsense. My intention wasn’t to trick you into these emails, I just wanted to separate them from the podcast. If you unsubscribe from this, you will still receive the podcast notifications from Substack.