I am presently failing

“Jump off the cliff!” they said. “It’ll be fun!” they said.

I had a dream a couple nights ago.

In it, I was trapped in a cave with only a crescent moon-shaped opening too narrow to squeeze through. It was just me. The cave stretched on into the darkness behind me. I had no idea how far back it went; what was back there; or whether it led to some other way out.

All I knew was: 1) I was in the front chamber of a cave with an exit too small to escape through; 2) I was on my own to figure out how to get out of there; and 3) If I didn’t, I’d be Johnny Skeleton by the time some archeologist someday found me.

The whole dream had the feeling of one of those Escape Room challenges where you get locked in a room somewhere and have a certain amount of time to solve your way out only in this scenario, the deadline for having it figured out was, literally, the dead line.

It wasn’t a nightmare. It didn’t feel scary per se; it felt more like the sort of high-key alert I’d probably be in that kind of scenario in real life.

It wasn’t just a regular ol’ dream either because it didn’t fade or end as I came out of sleep into that drowsy space between ‘still out’ and ‘now up’. Instead, my mind kept turning it over even as I got out of bed.

So, it was neither nightmare nor dream.

It was more that my brain got up a couple of hours early and then tried to pad softly about the place without waking the rest of me up which I suppose was polite of it.

That phenomenon - the whole ‘brain booting up while I’m asleep’ thing - happens to me sometimes. This one was just a new twist on an old, familiar dance; and the reason it happened is familiar too because it is always the reason:

I’m stressed. I’ve been stressed. I am stressed.

It doesn’t exactly take deep self-examination to connect the dots between cause and phenomenon there. There are only two of them.

My little case of insomni-brain was just what sometimes happens to me when I’m a very specific kind of stressed; it doesn’t happen when I’m just garden-variety worried about something. I have to be stressed about something 1) foreseeable; 2) potentially painful; 3) not certain to happen; but also 4) not easily remedied.

The problem has to be akin to a freight train still some distance down the tracks which would produce a collision if not averted; if I don’t get untied from the tracks before it arrives, an order of The Mike Special is going to go from a whole chicken to a three-piece combo. I would very much like to avoid that.

A whole rotisserie Mike is enough for a whole family. Being reduced to only a few pieces would really not be terrific. I have mouths to feed; and after dinner, I’m on point for breakfast.

The Trouble Train is never something bearing down on me at high speed per se; it’s something rumbling towards me which I see coming and have been spinning to try to get my arms around.

That last part – the spinning – is kind of like what can sometimes happen to a computer. The brain of the system – the CPU – is loaded with chips with only so much capacity for processing. They function within a range kind of like a speed limit; and the hardware is programmed to keep them working within that range.

If they are made to run too fast for too long, eventually, they melt down and reduce the whole machine to a very expensive paperweight. That process of being made to compute faster than they are designed to is called ‘overclocking’.

Sometimes, when I’ve been trying to find an escape from some Trouble Train for a while without success, I spiral into overclocking.

It is really unhelpful. And unfun.

The approaching potential crisis is real and exists; my concern about it is entirely rational and founded. So, while the spiral into overclocking isn’t helping, it’s just a symptom of a larger problem… which is:

This whole abrupt cliff-dive of mine into being a writer is presently on an un-good trajectory.

I am presently failing.

At this particular moment, I am failing at staying airborne.

I am heading earthward.

That hasn’t reached terminal velocity yet and there is still time to potentially pull up; but if I don’t, the result will be an extremely unpleasant reunion with the ground.

That is just the blunt punchline of the current state of my attempt at a writing career.

I think we are societally conditioned to subconsciously think “Winners never lose” as if success is a straight line without setbacks or near-failures; and I think that conditioning inherently comes with an implied converse of “therefore, if you’re losing, you’re a loser.”

I think that conditioning is bad and broken and harmful. I think it silently pressures people to sugarcoat their struggles while polishing their successes until they shine and presenting only those. So, rather than soft-pedal how I’m doing right now so as to present to you my most impressive self or avoid having you see an unimpressive version, I am just being bluntly honest.

The root of the issue is that I am still a pretty hefty distance away from being able to sustain being a writer as an ongoing occupation. I don’t need to close all of that distance immediately or next week; however, I absolutely need to close it.

There ain’t no ‘can’t afford it but can still keep doing it forever’ option. So, I have to reach the sustainability threshold or it’s “R.I.P., Little Hemingway. We hardly knew ye.”

I don’t need to reach sustainability tomorrow or even this month. I just need to be on a path toward reaching it.

And that’s the problem. I was. And now I’m not.

Over the past six months, I went from riding an initial updraft which felt like “OH, MY GOD. I AM A GODDAMNED EAGLE. I AM GOING TO SOAR THE ABSOLUTE SHIT OUT OF THIS FLYING THING.” to suddenly fighting headwinds from Elon Musk’s rather comprehensive fucking up of Twitter which felt more and more like trying to advance a blimp turned head-on into a wind… and then the nose dipped below the horizon line.

This little flight went from feeling exhilarating and freeing in a way I haven’t felt in at least a decade… to simmering concerned… and, now, a bubbling terror.

The vexatious mortal enemy of any subscription-based business is ‘churn’. People leaving. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a magazine, a gym, cell service, or Jelly of the Month, the tide pulling against the business is people leaving.

When HBO was a client of mine, they needed to bring in a volume of new customers each year equal to a startling 15-20% of their entire customer base just to offset the people who churned out.

That’s just how it works in subscription-based businesses. People leave. You have to replace them with at least as many.

My issue started on the ‘additions’ side. Thanks to Musk’s changes to Twitter, writers’ ability to reach their own audiences at all plummeted; and worse, their ability to reach them about things they published here was all but cut off… and along with that lost ability went my prior best means of feeding the ‘addition’ column.

In parallel, as always happens in subscription businesses, some people left. The total in the ‘additions’ column went down; the total in the ‘subtractions’ column went up. As a result, the net between the two columns went from nicely positive… to slightly upwards… to flat… to slightly negative.

In May, I slid while having a long way left to climb. That happening some month wouldn’t be terror-worthy on its own. The thing about that math which throws the fear of god into a hypothetical man in his early 50’s who really doesn’t want to end up as sidewalk art who may or may not be me is in the first half of the equation… the loss of updraft on the addition side. If I can’t add, I am helpless to offset subtractions. That’s death by a thousand paper cuts.

Now, combine a growing sense of powerlessness on the addition side with the inevitability of some subtractions and you have the perfect first two dominoes to set off a cascade toward some eventual Grade A overclocking… and that is exactly what happened.

Those two dominoes toppled and then a bunch of others, diabolically, fell in succession.

• I started gripping the wheel tighter on the need to produce… write things… publish… put things up…

• My schedule got progressively less accommodating. As I felt more and more pressure to write; I had shittier and shittier windows of time to do it…

• Meanwhile, as someone still in the very early first months of being free to write, I found myself drawn to writing longer things… and with me thinking at the time that I could just write my way off the train tracks, writing longer seemed fine… but it made it harder to get things to the finish line; therefore, I reached the tape less often and when I did, those pieces “did less well” in terms of ‘additions’ at least in part because longer pieces “do less well” in general…

• That then led to me feeling triple-pressured to produce more under worse conditions yet with better results. I started to subconsciously feel like I had to hit a six-run home run in every at bat. After a piece I was really proud of, I didn’t feel like it had been an extra great at-bat in a game where an array of singles, doubles, triples, and home runs are fine; it felt like the next piece had to find the bleachers too. Over the past six weeks, I have abandoned at least 5-10x more writing than I have posted. I have literally gotten pieces to what felt like 80-90% done one day… and then come to feel the next day like they weren’t great or maybe sucked and I didn’t want to post them anymore WHILE ENTIRELY KNOWING that if I had just had enough time to finish them the prior day, I absolutely would have posted them without hesitation and they would have been…

• Now, just to layer on a perfect butter cream icing to the wedding cake celebrating the marriage of my stress to my self-doubt, just as all of this reached a towering seven layers, I had an issue with getting my ADHD meds which led to an abrupt cessation and complete withdrawal…

• And, finally, for reasons having nothing to do with writing, I don’t really just carry cakes like the above in careful arms. Instead, they got boxed and bowed in a carrying case of truly clinical financial PTSD – which is actually a thing

Add all that up and you have yourself a direct path toward where my brain landed yesterday morning at 5 am – up three hours ahead of the rest of my body trying to figure out how to escape from a cave. That is some magical overclocking.

I have been overclocking. It has been accelerating.

I know that. I know the cause has been my trajectory nosing down. I know the nosing-down itself has been the result of a combo of things. I know some of them are beyond my control. And finally, I know that not only are some of them within my control, some are entirely my own fault and of my own making.

My little flight problem isn’t happening solely to me nor is it happening solely because of me; it’s happening though and part of that is my own damn fault.

As a result, at present, I am failing. If not remedied, my little hang-glide over the coast of California is going to end with me becoming a messy splotch in the sand encircled by horrified beachgoers.

I share all of this with you because regardless of what happens from here, I would rather be ‘a person well seen’ than ‘a façade well marketed’.

I’d rather that my eventual biography be a work of non-fiction regardless of its storyline or ending.

And… I am not afraid to fail in front of you.

Regret is heavy. Failure is pretty light. If I ultimately fail at this endeavor, while that would come with some grief, I would carry it fairly lightly knowing I would never have to wonder “What if I had tried…”.

If I fail, I fail.

I have no interest in being less open when descending than when climbing.

For better or worse, if you’re along for the flight, you get the whole movie.

With all of that said, I ain’t about to crash without at least a spectacular cartwheel out of the sky first after having given my best.

I am not one to take falling flat, uh, lying down.

So, I called an emergency team meeting yesterday. Brought the whole squad in on a weekend. Hated to do it. But I had to…

Sunday, Me, Myself, and I met up in an empty corporate campus parking lot and talked all of this over. We came up with some ideas to fly easier and right the flight. One of us proposed a name – I can’t remember if it was Me or Myself - and the rest of us agreed.

‘More Happy, Less Flappy’

That’s a topic for another post.

In the meantime, hey, all of this is where I am. Or where I’ve been at least. I’d rather be well seen than well marketed; and now ya see me.