My big, fat, lying brain

Who’s driving this ship of Theseus?

Hi!

This has been an intense week.

As you know, I have an anxiety disorder and ADHD. I have also suffered from depression.

I’ve been making a concerted effort to find ways to live in this world that play to my strengths.

This is tough because my brain lies to me all the time. It’s just one lie, exaggeration, and distortion after another with that guy.

As John Green said in a recent episode of the Dear Hank & John podcast, “I don’t know who’s driving this ship of Theseus.”

Every time I finish a project and put it out into the world, I enter a shame and depression spiral. This is not only profoundly unpleasant, but it also makes it hard to get work done.

To combat my tried-and-true self-sabotaging habits, I’ve been doing radical stuff like trying new things.

On my daily walks, I’ve been sitting on the ground and taking pictures of the stuff I see down there.

This past week I took these pictures:

This exercise has felt a little ridiculous and incredibly exhilarating. There’s something about physically changing my perspective that shakes loose the mental plaque coating the walls inside of my head.

(I imagine my brain as an ancient, poorly lit archive where all my memories and knowledge bits are stored on fragile scrolls in a catacomb of cubbies that extend infinitely in all directions and are looked after by different personalities. Sometimes Anxiety and Depression alter the scrolls to meet their needs, and other times ADHD just sets them on fire. The main caretaker spends most of his time putting out fires, chasing away the forgers, and trying to comply with my incessant check-out requests.)

Dabbling in macro photography with my iPhone and getting down and dirty with the small things of the world has helped me hear my intuitive mind clearly for the first time in forever.

Another activity I tried to change my thinking was meditating in different places. I don’t do traditional transcendental meditation, where you focus on your breathing. That kind of work always gives me a nasty headache.

For my meditation, I instead focus on either a single thought or I picture a blank chalkboard (one that’s been recently erased, so it’s not clean—it still has all the eraser smudges—but there are no decipherable images on the board).

I usually meditate in my supremely comfy office chair. This week I tried meditating in the Blue Ribbon Bunny or Old Blue, for short (that’s our 15-year-old minivan that was named by our then young children, who were big fans of the Disney show Sophia the First). That was a disaster. I couldn’t get comfortable, it smelled like old fries, and the outside world was too noisy for me to focus.

I also tried sitting on the floor in front of my bookshelves. I ended up staring at the spines of some poetry books instead of closing my eyes—but I did have a bright flash of inspiration in the 20 minutes I was down there.

I saw that I need to be focusing on ways to help you expand your creative horizons. My gift is not so much one type of creative endeavor or niche. What I’m good at is brainstorming. I’m a human prompt machine. I have an unlimited number of ideas and notions of things to try. I see the world as if I’m looking through kaleidoscope glasses.

I’m good at mashing things together that have no business being mashed together.

And that’s what I’m going to keep sharing with you, my weird ideas and experiments in creativity. I imagine most of my ideas, like sitting in the mud and taking pictures, won’t work for you. But some of them will help you get unstuck or give you a little spiritual or emotional lift amidst the drab daily routine that is only broken by increasingly shocking tragedies.  

That’s my goal.

One of my obsessions is how religiosity and spirituality interact with data technology. A while ago (March of 2018), I wrote this hourglass poem as a secular version of the Lord’s Prayer that highlights how we worship technology:

Recently. I’ve been adapting it into a short comic. Here are the first few pages:

I would love to hear what’s new in your world. What are you excited about this week? Share your small delights and petite moments of joy.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason

P.S. I would love to know what you think about this new format. It’s a mix between the intimate way I used to write snail mail letters to friends and the immediacy of the internet. For the next month, my plan is to write one of these letters a week for everyone and one additional one for my paid subscribers. If this new format works, I’ll keep doing it!