So where does it begin?

And what does it look like?

There is a select group of friends who get texts from me at odd hours, all reading some version of “I think this is something…I’m not sure if this is something. Can you tell me if it’s something?”

Most of those kind souls reassure me, tell me yes, it is something. They follow up with “now write the rest of it.”

And I don’t. Paid to write for a living, my “real” writing, my creative stuff, is gummed up in stacks of notebooks and in Word files named with the date and appended “exercise.”

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I was cat-sitting this week, and one of the cats had this toy that’s just a ping-pong ball locked into a circle where it can spin but can’t be dislodged.

I watched one of the cats bat at it, trying to catch it as it spun, trying to knock loose something that was never gonna come loose. In a low, resigned voice, I said out loud to myself “fuck, dude.”

I don’t know if I’m the ball or the cat, but after years of circling my own writing, I don’t want to be either anymore.

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I think it was the third or fourth grade — whenever we started writing long form, when long form meant six sentences, tops — to avoid starting every sentence with “I.” The last few years, humbled by a self-awareness that’s done well for my personal relationships but that I didn’t actually ask for, I have been hypervigilant about not starting every sentence with “I.” But it turns out that way anyway. And it’s frozen me.

A misplaced sense of humility, or a fundamental misunderstanding of the word, has made me hesitant to share my writing, most of it stories from twenty years ago, when I was diagnosed as fun-at-parties, long before my diagnosis of maybe-don’t-tell-anybody.

This is my second swat at a substack, but one of countless iterations of me sharing, then deleting writing I put online. I’m uncomfortable with an online persona, for one — I say this, though I have made countless multi-story instagram posts about owls and the cold war that probably tip their hand to my offline mental state as well. But the collections of stories that make up repeated lists in stacks of notebooks (soft-sided sketchbooks lacking spiral binding, a lesson learned accidentally but one for which I’ll be forever grateful) — I keep thinking they’re made to be something bigger. Memoir, essay. But then humility kicks in again, that fear of starting too many sentences with “I.”

And some of it is just fear of creating a paper trail of my own navel-gazing as I try to parse out what’s got larger meaning and what’s just loose thread.

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None of this explains what this is, not really.

This is a stab at writing consistently, and writing something fresh. This is a way to save my friends from the urgency of the “Is this something?” texts that are, some nights, please tell me I’m a real writer texts.

This will also get deleted, eventually, like all of my attempts to share my writing often do. Maybe it’ll be interesting in the meantime. At the very least, it’ll free the ball from the loop for a little while.