I just renewed my blog domain for another year (despite not updating it wholeheartedly since January) because it still gets a lot of traffic. Logic dictates that this is good for work, although nothing in google analytics suggests that people are reading my robotic posts about conference appearances, gigs and other poorly-written sludge. Instead, all the traffic goes to my half-baked memoirs.

There’s an E.B. White quote I like very much -  “writing is both a mask and an unveiling” - and I think that’s why I go through periods of public candour and then shut it down just as abruptly. Sometimes it feels extremely liberating to air your bullshit - and other times, when known as “the girl who carefully airs her bullshit”, the expectation weighs on you until what you produce makes you feel like a massive faking flake.

I’ve hid any candour behind pens and paper for a bit. While excavating through my sad and diseased purse tonight, I’ve found innumerable receipts, napkins, matchbooks - whatever - all with tiny scribbles across them. Without the pressure of an audience, I realize I lack focus. I’m just carrying around a filthy satchel (oof, that sounds dirty in type) of momentary whims - I never prod myself to explore them, and they disintegrate in the bottom of my purse alongside loose tobacco, gum wrappers and flecks of make-up.

So - I’m transplanting some of these updates here from now on - tumblr being the low-pressure thought dumpster that it is.  Now that the preamble is over….

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….I’ve been focused the last few weeks on what I’ve gotten right or wrong since I moved to Toronto, having just celebrated my 10-year anniversary of living in the city. I was an industrious, haphazard little thing when I arrived here, and I don’t suspect this has altered much. In this retrospective spirit, I found this Dali quote scrawled across an ABM transaction from Friday (with blackened gum stuck to it):

“Intelligence without ambition is like a bird without wings.”

For the sake of full disclosure, I have an IQ of 104 - this isn’t me about to wank away on some lovely trumpet. I have made it through my life on the recognition that I’m just smart enough - that’s not the point of this.

I wrote this down because I’ve been in maintenance mode for the last two years. After 8 years, four registered businesses, and 1886 nights of debtor cold-sweats, I finally found myself at the forefront of a business that yielded net positive results, alongside a team of people I still utterly adore, who provide products that I can testify to without a trace of doubt.

It’s a pretty sweet deal, as I remind myself every morning when I’m walking to work, and I have no plans on retiring from this anytime soon. But there is an absence of something - mostly famine and reactionary discord - that reminds you that you are no longer fighting for that initial proof of concept, the exercise of proving yourself right. There’s an absence of validation in this.

Fighting for consistency and measured growth is admirable and necessary - but it’s not the stuff of dreams. The danger is when this maintenance ideology seeps into your day-to-day life and you consequently lose your fearlessness. Your ability to build things ebbs away. You attract static people. You mistake superficial charms for beauty. You stop debating. You cease being so curious. 

This is my most recent wrong - I think somewhere before the spring, I may have been that wingless bird, and summer incited a reclamation period of sorts. Again I’m finding myself most happy when plotting things best defined as grandiose (and possibly a bit stupid) with all the logistical superpowers I can muster.

When you finally entrench yourself in this mindset again, the rest of your life follows suit - you regain that reckless curiosity. You’re drawn to thoughtful people who breed excitement. You pour over books. You curate new interests. You discover new types of beauty. You happily debate.

I know I sound very “young Parisian writer” right now, but for awhile there was the absence of “feeling like your on the cusp of something great” - this, in spite of my strongly-held belief that if you don’t have that feeling 75% of the time, you’re probably doing it all wrong.

Now reclaimed, I look forward to living fearlessly again, with all the seemingly endless labour, ardent love, and all other goodkind mess it entails.

Put another way, I am back on the tired Anais Nin train after my tired sabbatical. “Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.”