The internet is exhausting

On creative community & analog remedies(?) for digital overwhelm

Doing direct animation on 16mm film at Sundae School

Last month I had the sweet fortune of attending a small retreat organized by a few friends. Called Sundae School, this DIY gathering took place on the Kitsap peninsula, in an old house and several adjacent buildings all comfortingly filled with charming curios and treasures. For three days, about a dozen of us ate meals at one long picnic table flanked by blackberry bushes, attended (and taught) workshops, and generally mingled in the forested, picturesque setting that was just musky and dilapidated enough so as to put me as ease—to feel I belonged there.

Gifts are found to be at the end of each strand in this web.

That mixture of curated and raw probably applies to my Sundae School experience in general; it was homespun and rich, resulting in an uncommon kind of shared, creatively stimulating encounter.  I’ve most often found a concentrated sense of collaborative inquiry as a student, a condition which created but also strained my ability to socialize with its constant busyness and imposing duress of deadlines. Sundae School was nice because it was free of those constraints but retained a genuine spirit of inquiry, all without the snag of prestige and competition that I expect to find at formal conferences like AWP. And while Sundae School involved writing and writers, it also wasn’t a writing conference—we weren’t there to talk about literature or getting published, and writing wasn’t the only creative mode engaged. We learned about 16mm film and created our own direct animation on film stock that Benji played for us on the last night, we did awkward but fun exercises with interpretive dance, I taught a workshop about creative organization, Hillary hid treasures at the end of a spiderweb of yarn. We explored architectural criticism, narrative voice, compressed forms, storyboards, and prosody. It was more like weird summer camp than a conference, and I liked that. I liked getting to think about things outside of the scope of my ordinary circuit of curiosities, while also getting the opportunity to bring things my friends shared with me back to the enduring practice of writing. I liked that all of that was mixed in with cooking and eating food, washing dishes, being restless in the in-between time, sleeping, and other more or less ordinary activities, because that seems like a more real and reasonable environment for thinking about the world and about art than one isolated from daily life. 

Strolling in a crew on the final day of Sundae School.

With all that said, I arrived at the retreat feeling exhausted and left feeling even more so. I’d rushed to get ready for the retreat with my tank already half empty, drained by cognitive overload I’ve lately encountered at my work-from-home day job. Sundae School filled me up in so many ways, even though it also took a lot of social energy to participate in its synchronized rhythms. Lit up but doubly exhausted, returning to work felt even more draining and superficial compared to Sundae School’s utopian authenticity. 

One of the consequences of this particular iteration of exhaustion is that I’ve had little energy to engage with the digital activity that approximates (if not actually creates) creative community in my day-to-day life. It’s been a trend for a while, but feels unavoidably “severe” right now. Responding to emails has felt like wading through deep, sticky mud—slow and laborious. Email newsletters I enjoy reading—which I have a hard enough time keeping up with when I’m not fatigued—have stacked up without reprieve in bolded, unopened rows. I’ve scrolled Instagram for a total of maybe 10 minutes in the last month, which may sound virtuous but mostly feels like ghosting a diffuse but real chorus of friends, writers, and artists who help me feel less alone in my creative solitude. And all of the IG posts I’ve schemed—about Sundae School, writing, and being alive (etc etc)—are all just waiting in the wings. 

Faced with this juxtaposition of a stimulating (though exhausting) in-person experience of Sundae School, and my diminished capacity to participate with digital community, I wanted to gather up a few thoughts and questions about creative connection as it relates to overwhelm, computers, and actual creative practice. 

It bums me out that a significant way I stay connected to creative community is through aggressively disembodied digital activity. I have little stamina for it, especially now that I spend the majority of my workday on a computer, doing less meaningful things on it than ever before. There’s a lot of noise and hyped-up performance on social media, so avoiding it feels more than justified. But when used judiciously, I actually like how it connects me with others’ creative processes and widens the scope of my world. And it’s not just social media I’m talking about. I also like reading/seeing others’ work online, and tuning in ever so lightly to the broader conversations currently in circulation. These connections and conversations ground my own practice. In their absence, my life can feel a bit Shelton gothic: pensively stationed in a house with a partially-dismantled lawn, surrounded by trees and small-town antics, and resigned to a rich inner life whilst I write and edit marketing newsletters (for money). 

I would choose a rich inner life over the frenetic sense of always “catching up” that comes with being very online (or aspiring to be so). I’m sure this is the choice I’m sometimes faced with, like maybe right now. Because while I’m more or less clueless as to what’s going on on the internet (with publishing, other writers, and so on), I am actually writing. Maybe it’s always better, when I’m overwhelmed or tired, to shift from taking things in to processing them (or creating them). But I don’t want to be here forever,  too overwhelmed to engage with others’ work and ideas, unable to show up to digital spaces with a spirit of generosity and curiosity—because while they’re not the only spaces where things are happening (thankfully), they are particularly accessible, and a particular kind of active. Right now I’m in a tricky bind where my need for creative community (which brings energy) is outpaced by how depleting it has felt to keep track of, and navigate, the digital realm. 

The zine I made for my workshop at Sundae School. Its title, “Flexible Means,” borrows from a term I heard Miranda Mellis (a mentor and friend) say, describing the many ways through which one can engage in creative practice.

The workshop I taught at Sundae School was about creative and ADHD-friendly forms of organization for writing, daily life, and the places where they overlap. When putting the workshop together, it hit me that there is a whole collection of mundane issues that get in the way of my writing practice—but which I rarely (if ever) discuss as creative or craft-related problems. I’ve felt creatively “blocked” many points during the past year and a half, but I would say that my biggest issues have been:

• Straight-up time and task management.

• Overwhelm about the volume of writing I’ve already generated.

• Uncertainty about where I’m keeping track of research, notes, and archival material related to my project.

• A lack of meaningful structure with respect to finishing drafts.

I’ve definitely grappled with juicy questions about narrative and form, and negotiated with imposter syndrome (or whatever) about being a writer when I feel lately I’ve put so little of it out there. Maybe I lack insight into just how much those technical and psychological concerns impact me, and they’re definitely not separate from the quotidian aspects of my work. But it really does feel like organization, external structure, and executive function are the things to focus on—and also the least likely to seem relevant or compelling. 

My digital fatigue/burn-out is in this neighborhood of concerns. I’m in this weird holding pattern where digital shit is especially exhausting because of digital clutter, but dealing with this clutter requires effort and time I’m reluctant—or just too tired—to devote to it. I’m wary of this work. I have gone on many overly-optimistic, energy-sucking rampages setting up new digital systems (that I later abandoned) before I understood what works for me. (I’m still figuring that out, which I will say more about it in a moment!) 

Meanwhile, the overwhelm I feel about the sheer volume of people and things I could possibly engage with stands in the way of engaging with any of them, while my dis-ease with being this disconnected grows. Just like I want to do some serious, project-related file management, I also might be ready to sift through my ever-growing collection of notes about books and writers to look into, magazines to read, podcast episode schemes, fan mail to write, books to really sit with and absorb, online workshops I want to teach, little idea-leads that friends have suggested I trace—not because I’m afraid of falling behind, but because I want to be present with at least some of what’s happening out there—because I want to participate. 

But I don’t think the remedy for my (mostly digital) overwhelm is going to be found through digital means. It’s too slippery and unconstrained, and bears its own momentum. I’ve been revisiting The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll, which isn’t perfect—I don’t relate to its undertone of optimization in its narrative style— but it’s been refreshing nonetheless. It’s reminded me that one of the key aims of that analog notebook technology (keeping track of the various loose ends of one’s life in a single notebook) is to physically process them: to allow the objects of one’s overwhelm to manually handling them in handwriting, rather than seamlessly stockpiling tasks and tangents in ever-expanding digital containers. I think it would feel good to just write down (in a notebook) about what exactly I feel like I’ve lost track of, what it is that I’m looking for, and how I want to move through the process. Not all of my messes are equally impactful—some are best allowed to fester or desiccate—and it’s hard to get that clarity when faced with the horizontal plane of a screen. And as tempting as it is to try to create cohesion in my computer (etc), I think that has only ever been an illusion, forever out of reach in its endless tessellations. Things I voluntarily opt to do in the sprawling realm of the digital do matter to me, but I want that activity to be grounded first in my body.

Usually I’m found with not one, but two, notebooks.

With the analog methods of reflective writing and list-making, inefficiencies can be one of their affordances. They introduce a pause to consider what I’m actually even trying to do, and what matters most. They externalize ideas, and that tangibility allows me to engage with them with more focus and consideration. These methods also help me get space from the ambiance of urgency that’s hard to disentangle from the digital. Because while my challenges are organizational, they’re not just about “what” (the sheer volume of info and stimuli) but “why,” and they’re compounded whenever I venture out into the psychic weather patterns of the online world, unanchored by a deeper sense of purpose. Thinking about creative community is sorting through competition, pressure to perform, past disappointments, and grief for a collective collective situation which makes it so difficult to create and sustain creative community. It’s also edged with shame about my limitations, about holding so many yet-to-be-consummated ideas and schemes. These are things I need to process with my body. I want to spend some time in my notebook writing about where that digital engagement intersects with genuine and deeply held hopes. I want to keep my hand moving, to connect my head and brain, and come back into my body around these things. Because when it comes to my voluntary efforts around navigating digital flux, the bodies that create and receive through it are (or should be) the “point” of it all, if there is a point at all.

P.S.

One of the things I really like about writing this newsletter is that it helps me identify and then clarify my thoughts/ideas about what's currently going on in my world or with my writing. Fittingly, writing this letter left me wanting to radically experiment with the format and cadence of this newsletter. What would it feel like to share this kind of longer reflective essay not every month, but only when I have something to say that fits that format? What forms of creative work or community engagement might open up if I re-trained myself around the volume of effort and ideas I put into these letters? What would I lose, if anything? Does the monthly constraint enable, or drain? Can I remain consistent without holding myself to the same format? Is consistency even the main thing to aim for here?

Putting aspirations on blast and then not following through on them is one of the things I’m the most self-conscious about when it comes to stuff I share in newsletters and on social media. At the same time, it’s also a way to encourage myself to follow through! So, I’m excited to see what comes of this inkling come September, and as always, I appreciate your generous witnessing.

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Join me at Browsers Books!

Celebrating the release of Sift by Alissa Hattman
Saturday, September 9th @ 4pm

I’m very honored and excited to be reading alongside Alissa Hattman, who is celebrating the launch of her novel Sift. Details are below for you Olympia friends. (There are other great Sift launch readings and events this autumn, including a virtual 3rd Thing cohort event through City Lights in October.)

Speaking of creative community, Alissa is an extraordinarily generous and wise writer whose newsletter MURMUR is a touchpoint for me for sincere community engagement. I highly recommend!

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Culture list

Recent reading, listening, and viewing

• Tripas by Brandon Som (dazzling poetic maneuvers & drenched in story)

• Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chödrön (enjoying slowly)

• The Retrievals by Susan Burton (dramatic podcast docu-series)

• Barbie at the Shelton drive-in (a good time was had & I thought about narrative devices)

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Offerings

• Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms (TBC)

• Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions (TBC)

• Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice

• Follow me on Instagram — I’m there sometimes

• Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters [currently I’m slowly migrating it over to Substack from Mailchimp]