I am a big notetaker. I truly believe my brain is meant to generate ideas and not hold them. I carry at least two and at most four notebooks with me all the time, record voice notes, and send messages to myself on WhatsApp. I don't seem to have a problem finding things to say until I think about someone else reading them.
But somewhere between writing a thought down and putting it out in the world, I drop the ball. When I publish, I put myself under the weight of external expectations. The moment I put a title, a date and the reading time on my essays, it starts to look like I know what I am talking about.
Is this useful? Is it obvious? Has someone already said it better? What qualifies me to say anything about this?
My notebooks have never asked this much of me.
It would be so easy to say this space is for me and I don't really care what anyone thinks. But that would be a lie. I do care, and I do want anyone reading this to get something out of what I write. I have a deep respect for someone's time, and I can't invite someone to read and then pretend that their experience is irrelevant.
What I am trying to ask myself is how much I need to offer.
When I read, sometimes it's to learn something new. Sometimes someone's writing will give shape to a thought I've been carrying around without quite understanding it. Oftentimes those things happen together. I rarely care to ask whether the writer is the first person in history to make these observations. But I do care whether someone's writing resonates with me on either a personal or intellectual level.
Which is lucky, because resonance is about all I can offer. I don't write to teach.
For me, writing is more a form of documentation. I like to document life. Torn pages from a notebook, letters from my high school friends, old movie tickets, a beat-up friendship bracelet. I have a folder full of things like this that I have never been able to throw away. None of it is worth anything, but I hold on to it as evidence of a life lived.
My writing looks a lot like that folder.
In Putting Ideas into Words, Paul Graham describes how writing develops and changes his ideas. A finished essay can make it look as though the writer understood everything beforehand and simply recorded it. The process is much less orderly.
As much as I love this essay, it complicates my idea of writing as documentation. I have no clue where I am going with my sentences. I write one thing and then the next sentence reveals that I don't quite believe the first. Documentation assumes the thing already exists before you record it. For me, the thought doesn't exist until I write it.
Publishing is another decision, though. I haven't published anything here in 11 months, and it isn't because I stopped writing. There are plenty of thoughts that belong in my notebook while I spend more time with them. Being unfinished doesn't automatically make a piece interesting, any more than being polished makes it useful.
So how do I give a thought enough care to make it worth sharing, without requiring it to be settled?
This essay is a small example. I started with the idea that Timecapsule was for me and I had made the audience too important. But following that thought led somewhere less convenient: I do care about the reader, and I want to keep caring. Now I have a more precise question about which expectations help me write and which ones keep me from it. I haven't figured it out yet, but I do understand myself better.
So this is what Timecapsule is going to be from here on out. Not a portfolio of finished and polished essays, but a folder, like the one with the movie tickets and the friendship bracelet. Messy streams of thought. Whatever I am actually thinking about that week, half-formed and unresolved, notes on things I am reading, arguments I will disagree with in six months. Evidence of thinking done. I can't promise that what I write will be the most valuable piece you read in the day. But I promise you this: it will be honest.
Either way, we are so fucking back.