These past few weeks I’ve been writing various starts to some ideas I have had related to civilization, colonialization, biases, and so on. The trouble is that every paragraph seemed to deserve another paragraph which deserved another paragraph… and so on.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading The Second Swim, a substack that caught my attention when I followed the author, Iona Italia, on Twitter. Being of mixed descent herself, and being a writer who has me wishing I had written some of her stuff because it’s great, had me considering Substack.

But here’s the rub with Substack: You need subscribers, and honestly, I simply have not been writing as I should because my time has been split with some volunteer work I have been doing, and even that is an excuse as I have had the time and not used it properly. I’ve gotten… lazy. So I need to get back into a rhythm. There was a time when I wrote more than one entry a day about a decade ago. I also don’t write about one thing other than the one thing being what I feel like writing about.

Iona’s piece, Time’s A-Wastin: The Perverse Seductions of Procrastination hit this nail squarely on the head. I have been using Twitter quite a bit because of some of the stuff I have been up to, even perversely so. For the past months, since February 24th, I have been catching updates on Ukraine, the United States, and global trends, as well as researching and learning new things about colonialism from around the world.

I’d wake up in the morning and find myself drinking my cup of coffee as I leafed through Twitter and finding the updates that happened while I was sleeping. This was supposed to be my writing time, waking up fresh and hitting the keyboard, tapping out messages to the world that might be useful, might be entertaining, and perhaps even worth keeping and referring to. There’s so much to write about, and much like a child that is told that they can be ‘anything they want’, it’s hard to pick a direction at times.

Paralysis.

After pushing out a shelved book into OpenOffice a year or so ago, and having reread it and seeing I could do better, I balk in the hope of finding that mystical one thing in an ocean of many things. The world refuses to stand still; when I start researching a topic it’s hard to know when to stop because it will take me laterally to something else. In Twitter spaces I find myself connecting things I would not otherwise connect, and the paralysis continues under the guise of being busy.

So now it’s time to focus on the writing again, and to push myself back into the discipline of writing often.