Wednesday.
I told a friend about feeling a bit lost, sharing my frustration at the bottlenecks I was facing with the system I had designed. He handed my feelings back to me as a solution: have no system.
Indignation. Hot and immediate stomach-drop, followed by an almost violent urge to defend myself…with words…obviously…and as we kept talking through what no system might look like, I started to feel genuinely queasy at the thought of stopping.
No system? The system is the whole point. My whole point.
But the indignation didn’t sit still, instead it spurred inspiration.
Which is particularly convenient, I know my friend wasn’t trying to dismantle years of my work. He was responding to a friend who had told him she felt empty and disconnected, without access to all the invisible architecture underneath what she’d said. I told him I could see where he was coming from. There was concern and care in what he’d offered me, even if my stomach had responded with absolutely fucking not.
He couldn’t see the system I was talking about. How could he? It’s years of work scattered across scraps of paper, a database, Word files, slowly evolving toward something with a publish button.
And somewhere between Wednesday and now, without noticing I’d started, I fixed the taxonomies, and massaged a few kinks. And being a glutton for punishment… I mean feedback… I showed some of what I’d made to another friend.
He read, digested, then told me I needed data. I got defensive again. Apparently this sharing with people is going well.
But if I am being honest, thank goodness I have friends who are true to themselves when they are with me. They are curious about my life, they question what I give them, and even when I don’t take it super well, they reflect back to me, the gap between what I know exists and what I’ve actually made possible for another person to see.
Perhaps that’s part of what I’m doing now.
Not creating a system from nothing, and certainly not abandoning one, but making tangible some of the things that have existed in scraps, files, experiments, half-finished ideas and my own head for years.
Defining them enough that they can exist.