I Lost Myself, Again

How I Strayed Off the Path On My Writing Journey

This piece isn’t for you. It’s for me. I need to write it. That’s not to say that you might not get something out of it. Because you probably will. Especially if you’ve ever told yourself that you won’t make the same writing mistakes twice. And then it’s the eleventh time you’ve capsized your boat in the same way. Hi. I’m here too.

The truth is, that right now, I’m not nearly as lost as I have been in the past. But I am creatively vacant. And I know why. I’ve been down this path before. Many times. But the last trip down this circuitous route led me to fail at Medium. Who knows how many followers I would have had now if I had never left and deleted over three hundred of my stories, along with my account? And that’s part of the circular problem when you write online.

Followers. Following. Views. Reads. Fans. Claps. It’s all just digital potpourri. And we all like to cram our noses into the bowl and just keep smelling and smelling. Except the problem is, that at some point, it all just smells the same because we’ve smelled it every day for a month. Or six months. Or a year. It becomes smell instead of a smell.

So how did it I do it? How did I lose myself, again? It’s pretty simple. I allowed myself to write things I didn’t love. I allowed myself to write in ways I wasn’t passionate about. I allowed myself to think an online following meant something. It doesn’t. It’s literally just the press of a button. I’d rather have fans.

I have no bones to pick with anyone outside of myself. I have some observations, but between the time I left Medium, and when I came back, I learned to take full responsibility for any negativity in my life. This isn’t a negative piece. It’s catharsis. Again.

I’ve been a little out of gas as of late in the writing department. I’ve found myself publishing or submitting pieces that were just fine. Maybe no one noticed, maybe they did. But I know I did. I was hamstrung by this isolation and busy with my real job, but as far as free time goes, I’ve had plenty to spare for the creative gods. I just wasn’t using my creativity the right way. Again.

I write for 22 Medium publications. 6 of them are publications that I created and run by myself. That means that I spend an enormous amount of my creative time reading, editing, publishing, and highlighting other people’s words. Don’t get me wrong, though. I love doing it. It’s just that as the publications grow, it leaves less and less time for my own scribbles.

The pot is empty. The water is off. I’m dry.

The Path

Poetry brought my soul back from the dead. Seriously. When I look back on all of the stories I deleted from Medium, very few of them were pieces of me. Do you understand what I mean? Like, literal pieces of me. That’s how I feel when I write poetry. I am shaving myself onto the page. The words, lost follicles looking for a home. Poetry is home.

That’s the beauty of the path I embarked upon when I returned. It was purer. It was anti-content. I mean, I’ve always been anti-content, but I used to write a lot of content. As I’ve always said, there is nothing wrong with being a content writer, but let’s not say that writing content is the same as writing. When you write content, your life doesn’t pour from your veins onto the screen and leave you wounded. It’s just a formula or words that can make money or get clicks or get views or get curated. That’s not what I want to do.

I didn’t think I was doing it. And for all intents and purposes, I haven't been. I’ve been writing poetry and dabbling in other stuff. I created a fiction publication and a memoir publication to help myself avoid the suck of content. It worked. And then it didn’t. Because I was short on time. And fiction and memoir take time. Content does not. I strayed off the path.

Getting Lost

When you type and then delete what you wrote, over and over again — you’re lost. That’s been me lately. Staring at a blank screen waiting for the muse or for any other thing to ask me to do it instead. It’s been kind of maddening. I’ve taken the easy way out a few times, but I think that’s how I got lost, again.

I started to realize that I was lost while doing intake for my publications. Some days, I get ten new requests to join a publication. For each one, I do my research. I read stories. I evaluate the writer’s follower to following ratio. It takes a lot of time. But oftentimes, there is information on the form that stands out and tells me that a writer may not be submitting for the right reasons.

And then I had to look at myself and evaluate my reasons. It’s pretty simple to diagnose. One of the questions I have is, “Why do you want to write for this publication?” When the answer is, “To increase my following and get more readers,” I know it will be a bad fit. But nothing against those writers because I often find myself falling into the same trap. The one that is far off the path I laid out for myself.

The quickest way I can tell when I’ve left the path is to look at my titles. If I find more numbers in titles, like 18 Completely Unimportant Things I Learned During Lockdown, I know I am straying. Again, this isn’t judgment. There are very good listicles out there, but there are so many bad ones. So many written as clickbait and schadenfreude.

The point is, I don’t want to write like this. I don’t want to write listicles. I want to write poems. And fictional entanglements. And heart-wrenching memoirs. But there I was, farming content and playing on the current status of our lives. I don’t like myself for it, but I know I am not alone.

I can also tell I’m wandering away when I submit something I know is not great. I had a great follow-up story idea for one of my pieces in Better Marketing, a series even. I workshopped it via email with Niklas Göke. The plan was solid. But then I sh*t the bed.

I rushed the article. It wasn’t good. And fortunately for me, Niklas told me that it wasn’t up to par. He was correct. And I went back to the drawing board. But when I was standing there, proverbial dry-erase marker in hand, I felt kind of ashamed. I don’t want to be writing like that either. It doesn’t make me feel anything inside. But I was doing it again. A boy in a field, without a compass, lost — again.

Getting Back on Track

Getting lost is fine. It’s actually a good thing. Because it’s another reminder that nothing bad happens when you get lost. It just takes some time to get back on track. That’s what this is. This winding and weaving, self-deprecating story on writing is just my way of finding the path again.

But I needed a couple of shoves in the right direction to get here. The second shove I got came from Dan Moore. I had submitted a poem for Poetry Sunday to P.S. I Love You and he responded with a completely harmless update on how they may look to streamline poetry formatting in the future.

I came back with three quick private notes defending my poetic style. But it wasn’t even about that for Dan. He runs a major publication. They are inundated with stories, poems, fiction and love ephemera. He and Kay Bolden are probably looking for snorkels most days. They are just trying to find a way to make their lives easier. And I get it. I am editing other people’s work all day long. I overreacted.

But, why I overreacted is more important. I did because poetry is life-blood to me. These words matter to me. They fill me up. They break me down. They make me smile. They make me proud. They make me cry. They make me feel something.

I responded like a jacka** to Dan, but recognizing that is what is getting me back on track. I want to write passionately. And writing satire or listicles or How I Did This and You Can Too makes me want to punch myself. And for hopefully the last time, that is not a jab at any of the amazing writers who write in those genres. I read a lot of good stories that start with How I. It’s just not what I want to do. And this time I would like to hold myself to it.

My Writing Journey

This is for you too. This writing journey is ours alone. That’s why I said My Writing Journey. It’s your writing journey, no one else’s. Write what you want. Write how you want. Do it your way. But remember, if your way is the way that someone told you how to do it to grow a bigger following — it’s not your way. It’s not your journey.

I hold no judgments. People who get content correct on a large scale are rich AF. People who use clickbait titles, but then provide high-quality stories please a lot of people. But just like everyone else, some days I look at my 20 views on a really good poem and I slowly descend into the dumps. But why? Why do I need external validation? I don’t want that on my journey, again.

I’m asking myself a lot of questions and will be making a lot of adjustments to what I put out there, but this time is different. I don’t feel like I need to go and remove all the stories that don’t fit. They are fine where they are. Some of them may even be worth a read. I’m just charting a new course. Because it’s my journey to take.

Sometimes we just need a break. We just need to shut our eyes. Get some sleep. Be still. A lot can change when you lose your way and then find it again. Sylvia Plath said it best:

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

I’m awake again.

I usually put one link here where I say, If you liked this, you might like this as well. But I haven’t written a story like this in a while. The link I will put here is my poetry archive. All of it. Not because I hope you read it. That would be nice of course. But because it is what beats inside of me when my own heart is cold. It’s all the words necessary to peer into my soul and none of the words that can be contained in a tiny self-promoting bio on a website.

I hope whatever writing journey you are on that it’s distinctly yours.