dancing with constraints, pt 1

mortal people problems, mirite?

“Existence can feel like a jail sentence sometimes. Everywhere you turn, there are constraints, pitfalls, rules and regulations. You have bills to pay, responsibilities to keep up with, live up to. It can all be quite suffocating, and worse, it can be outright dispiriting. Shitty circumstances are real, but it takes some cunning, preparation, and courage to even get a shot at breaking free from them. In reality, we are not in a singular jail, but in an infinite kaleidoscope of constraints and obstacles. The important thing is to not allow your heart to be “institutionalized” – to meekly accept its fate as a helpless caged bird. And above all else, do not be the one to imprison yourself.” – Introspect 1.2: Execute the Jailbreak

A part of me feels like I’m supposed to say that I love working with constraints. That’s what the artist does! All creativity happens within constraints, and the best creativity often happens at the bleeding-edge boundaries of constraints. I can think of contexts in which I’ve personally thought constraints are great. Twitter, for example, has a 280-character limit, and I love how it challenges me to be creative in little bite-sized chunks. There is a specific kind of beauty in a good tweet, and I have felt genuinely blessed to have been able to write a few of them.

But right now, in this moment as I sit down to write, I come in frustration. It annoys me that I have to wrangle with the constraints of being a goddamn human being. It annoys me that I get tired, that I need to sleep, and that my states of wakeful clarity are fleeting. I know what the smart thing to do is; I resent that I “have” to do it. And I additionally resent that expressing resentment is itself a fairly “low-agency” thing to do, and that there’s a “reputational cost” associated with that. But you know what, fuck my reputation. I would rather have a smaller handful readers who know and appreciate that I’m a real person, than a large audience that’s smitten with some false ideal of me, which would just be progressively more exhausting to impress.

((Sidenote on complaining, and constraints of medium: As I write this, it occurs to me that I’ve internalized a “don’t complain on public Twitter” heuristic, which I do still think is a smart thing to do because of the nature of that particular medium. But in a longer essay like this, I am significantly less constrained! I’m less constrained by character limits, and much more importantly, I’m less constrained by the expectations that readers bring to the table.

When you click through to read an essay, you already know that you’re going to go on a bit of a journey, and it’s going to require effort on your part. And within this context, I get quite a bit more freedom to be more experimental. I can take you on wilder journeys and trust that you’ll stay with me as I bring it back. “Is that not possible on Twitter?” It is with my my favorite mutuals, who put in time to conscientiously read each other’s tweets, but that’s not the default expectation on mainstream Twitter, which makes it harder to do. And the grammar of tweets themselves makes this difficult, which I’ll talk about in a separate essay soon, I hope. End of sidenote.))

Visakan Veerasamy ⛵️ @visakanv

One of the biggest tells that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about: glossing over addressing resource constraints, or saying things that imply infinite resources. Effectively everything is resource-constrained, & seasoned practitioners are especially sensitive to this

The above thread is something I wrote when I was lucid and clear, and it’s one of my better ones, that I’ve gotten a lot of value from reusing and re-sharing in all sorts of contexts.

I often feel like I’m multiple people, spirits, entities, all irreverently hot-desking the same piteous meatbag. I feel like I don’t have enough “consciousness points” to do all the things I want to do. I’ve had 20+ years of experience dealing with this (slaps forehead) beloved hunk’a junk, and I still haven’t learned to use it “effectively”. I’m still crashing and burning, covered in soot and skidmarks. To some degree I think this will always be who I am – I am a jinky janky junkyard operator, and while I can clean up nicely if I really have to, I think I should also be honest with myself about the motley, scrappy, labyrinthine nature of my operation. Aesthetic resonance really comes through when a creator is radically self-accepting of their deepest, truest nature.

As I write about my frustration, it occurs to me that this is at least partially a problem of project management. Not enough ‘consciousness points’ (CPs) to do what you want to do? Well, then you’re going to have to prioritize, sir! You’re going to have to draw up some plans, work in discrete smaller chunks, comment those chunks so that they can interface well with other chunks, and then they’ll come together and form the essays that you want! Spend some of your CPs to figuring out a smarter way to spend future CPs in a less wasteful way! I know, I know… I have gotten a lot better at this over the years… and yet! And yet, I have this frustrated whiny child self within me that’s crying out again, “I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna do project management! I wanna just have freedom to do whatever I want, however I want, all the time!”

And that conversation is playing out within me right now — in some sense I do have the freedom to do whatever I want all the time… but within the constraints of my biology. Which means that I’m mad that I get tired! And now I’m laughing, this is so funny to me — I’m a 32-year-old man who makes a living with his writing, who sometimes gets swept up in these highfalutin pretentions of profundity, and it turns out that my frustrations are with the most fundamental, infant-level things about my biology. I hate getting hungry, I hate having to pee, I hate getting tired. I hate that I have only a few hours of mental clarity available to me on-demand at any given time, and that I’m still so far from competent at being able to direct those hours fruitfully. I shake my fist dramatically at the universe for making me mortal. I don’t mind dying eventually, I think, but in the meantime it’s really annoying to have to plan around my meatbag’s constraints!

✱

I grieve and mourn all of the times I started an essay and didn’t finish it. I do still have the drafts lying around, and I do revisit them from time to time, but I very rarely am able to reinhabit the state of mind that I was in when I started it, so finishing them always feels disjointed. Not to be too grim, but they honestly feel like inert, hacked-up corpses that have lost their animating spirit. And here I get to the subject of what I think may end up being another essay, which is the constraint of mediums. I just did some quick glancing at a couple of related old drafts about the topic, vaguely wondering if I might have a couple of paragraphs I could sneak over without breaking the flow of this essay. And the answer is no, which annoyingly proves the point I’m making. Essays have a flow to them, and you can’t just swap paragraphs in and out without causing a disruption.

Less discerning readers might not notice, but I find it jarring. I think everyone can feel the difference, even if they can’t point to it. When the flow of the rhythm is right, it carries you beautifully through the essay. So while an essay is less constrained than a tweet, or a twitter thread, in terms of total wordcount, it’s more constrained in terms of the necessity of continuity.

One of the fun things about a twitter thread is that you can switch up quite dramatically from tweet to tweet, the grammar of tweets allows that. It’s like using cuts in film. You can’t cut an essay the way you cut a thread. It’ll be disjointed and incoherent. The challenge with each medium is to figure out what its constraints enable:

Visakan Veerasamy ⛵️ @visakanv

I love these oil painting cityscapes by Jeremy Mann, they take my breath away every time. When you make art, I think it's always useful to ask the question, "What is it about this medium that lets me do something I can't do with any other medium?" Jeremy has this figured out

The night is drawing to a close, and so I have to make a decision. Do I want to pause this essay here, and try to continue working on it tomorrow? I do not want to do that. Because I’ve been doing that repeatedly for months now, and every time I wake up the next morning I find that I’m no longer interested in working on the essay. That’s the nature of the constraint I am dealing with. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to glance through the essay as it is one more time, and I’m going to look for opportunities to add little touches that I feel make a difference. And then I’m going to ship it, even though it hurts inside for me to not be able to do justice to what I have envisioned. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it. Still, it hurts more for me to go months without publishing anything. That’s mortality for ya. We do the best we can with what we have, and it will have to be enough.