It hasn’t escaped my attention that ever since I stopped writing weekly essays on Substack over a year ago, whenever I feel especially anxious or stressed, I come up with some new way to think in public, and then quickly abandon it.

There was the time I tried to migrate the newsletter to ConvertKit.

There was trying out Obsidian Publish.

There was my “secret newsletter.”

There was This Is Not Writing Advice, about looking at writing process.

There was the short-lived idea of regularly pitching places.

There was writing pithy posts on LinkedIn.

There was the LGBTQ+ health newsletter I never publicized.

And now there’s this.

And in between these, I wondered if this was entirely the wrong approach.

Not because I had nothing to say. Not because I didn’t have the time or energy (although an argument could be made that I truly didn’t).

But because I’d also been reading about projects. I read Start Finishing by Charlie Gilkey and began worrying that such projects were automatically a constant open loop. Why not start and finish something, instead of saddling oneself with a weekly commitment?

Some people suggest doing a limited series, like a limited series podcast, rather than “starting a podcast.” I think this is wise, although I have no interest in having any sort of podcast, and I’m not sure how closely the limited series approach transfers to online writing.

So why not, for example, just write a book? (I also read Write Useful Books this year, which was an interesting perspective on how to write a nonfiction book–I should say, how to design a nonfiction book to be the most helpful to others, to, as he says, “recommend itself.”) I was intrigued by these ideas but nothing came to mind that I felt like I wanted to stand at the bottom of that mountain and commit to it.

There are plenty of topics that interest me, some of which actually do not have a book about them that already says what I’d like to say, but most of them don’t interest me enough that I want to commit, sight unseen, to writing a book about them.

Some people say 75% interest is okay for starting a project.

The book Working Identity says it can take 3-5 years to make a significant change in your professional life, that you have to try various things and tack back and forth for a while, considering various experiments for what you’d like to be doing.

Some people say you should set goals in the middle of a project, especially if it’s in an area you don’t know much about, where you may not know enough to set a goal of appropriate difficulty.

We’re inundated, of course, with the linear narrative, and with the seductive idea that if we could just find the right steps, we could get where we’re going.

(Or if we don’t know where we’re going, that we could take some right steps to find that out—an energy audit, perhaps, or a career coach, or a course, or a journaling practice.)

(I mean, we could even, I’m sure, buy a journal with prompts specific to helping us figure this out—a “low-content book” is what these are called, and apparently they’re the latest way that one can make a solid passive income selling online. So I’m told.)

I revisited my notes from Working Identity while I was writing this, because the author, Herminia Ibarra, has studied this gap between what people say or believe they want professionally and how they end up actually moving into a new career or professional life.

She writes that “you cannot discover yourself by introspection,” and that you must take action and “use the feedback from your actions to figure out what you think, feel and want,” that you should “test whether you really want what you think you want.”

Small wins, she says, can produce much bigger results because when we see a change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we become more afraid, less able to take a series of small steps. She advocates that crossing possibilities off the list—learning what you don’t want—is a form of progress.

She writes:

Don’t wait for a cataclysmic moment when the truth is revealed. Use everyday occurrences to find meaning in the changes you are going through. Practice telling and retelling your story. Over time, it will clarify.

I trust this, and maybe these different containers I keep creating and abandoning are experiments in different story shapes, in different ways of thinking in public, to find what’s most comfortable.

Nicole van der Hoeven spoke about the importance of precommitting—sharing that she committed in public to writing a book about Obsidian, then ultimately decided instead to write about Learning in Public. She points out that by precommitting, you can more clearly see the differences between what you said you were interested in and what you are actually interested in (in terms of what you read about, do with your time, or write shorter notes about.) This helped her to clarify what she really wanted to write about.

I’m also fascinated lately with the literature about “optimal stopping.” Apparently, mathematically, most people wait too long to quit something. Some say that the difference between a person’s or company’s success is their willingness to quit projects that they can see that they won’t become the best (or near-best at), so that they can turn their energy to something that would bring them greater rewards.

At the same time, the “exhaustive search” is romanticized, and is advocated in some spiritual literature, the idea that if you are truly committed to something, some insight, some way of life, that you should search for it exhaustively until you have tried everything.

(I was told this once as advice about a relationship that had run into trouble, that if we did an exhaustive search for how to make it work, either we would hit on a way to make it work or we could end it at full peace with the idea that we had tried everything.)

Of course, in many ways, mathematically, one cannot try literally everything, which is where optimal stopping comes in.

And perhaps it’s where ways of knowing comes in.

We need to look at the data.

We need to turn to trusted colleagues and mentors.

We need to be quiet and listen to our intuition.

These are all valid ways of knowing and they all can work together—alongside time, good questions, personal experiments, and close observation—to help us see things we hadn’t seen at the beginning.

Maybe these little writing projects I keep starting—always with a new title, always with a different aesthetic, a different ostensible focus—are my version of low-stakes experiments to see which particular facet I would like to inhabit, which self to put forward.

They all have their own choices of font, and of course, platform is an aesthetic choice as well. The LGBTQ+ health newsletter was on Beehiiv, the Not Writing Advice one was on Buttondown, there was also a short-lived continuation of the Substack essays project on Ghost, which I’ll admit I forgot about until now.

I don’t know if there’s an endgame here. I’m not naive enough to think that any one of these tiny projects will alone go viral. Maybe I’ll just keep making these tiny digital repositories of personal writing, like a squirrel hiding a few acorns here, a few there.

In the age of virality, of wanting ideas to scale, it’s hard to just let something be what it is, instead of looking at it for what it could become.

(It’s almost as though the ubiquitous question of children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is now being asked of any of our mini-projects, any of our hobbies. I’m tired of this mindset.)

Henrik Karlsson writes that a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.

Sara Tasker writes in Manifesto for Posting Online:

Make space for all of your creative facets in one place. Resist the temptation to file all of your beautiful parts into separate boxes. Let it steep together and mingle, like a magical floral tea.

And this is something that, to be honest, I’ve never tried before.

My personal essays were literary and musing, not technical. My LGBTQ+ health writing was strident and researched. My short-lived blog about career issues (I also forgot about that one) had a helpful and encouraging tone, but was too generic within the career space.

That’s why I thought they all had to live different places.

Here, where I have no audience at the moment, where I do not ever plan for posts to immediately hit anyone’s inbox, I want to try having all these facets at once.

So yes, it hasn’t escaped me that I keep creating these little writing projects, and yet each are different, each teaches me something new about what I enjoy or don’t enjoy, how I want to show up in public, what I want to think about—and crucially, how what I want to think about may differ from what I think I want to think about, or what I think sounds smart, or what I think others want to think about.

It teaches me about how I think about success, and what random online advice I am giving more weight to at the moment.

It teaches me about what I enjoy and make time for, and what I won’t make time for, teaches me the difference between what motivates me and what I only think should motivate me.

So yes, this is yet another writing project of mine that I am likely to abandon, and it’s one that I don’t know “what I’m trying to do with it” (because maybe I’m not trying to do anything,) and yet I’m confident I have something to learn here, because it’s a new experiment.

It’s a new shape for my thoughts. It’s a space for combining them that allows things that other spaces didn’t—even if the other spaces only didn’t because I refused to give myself permission to shape them more broadly.

Experiments are for gathering data. Data from the head, data from the heart, data from external sources.

I’m writing, and I’m paying attention.

So why am I writing here?

Because I enjoy it. And because I know I have something to learn here.