Six Years of Independence!
Hey friends,
It's been a while! If you forgot you subscribed to this newsletter that makes sense—the last e-mail I sent was over 4 years ago (lol). There should be an unsubscribe link in the footer if you're no longer interested.
Last month marked 6 years I've worked as an independent software developer. When you hit 6 years of doing something you start to look back and ask yourself what you wish you had been doing from the beginning.
For me, that's writing. Granted, I did some writing. My site has 40 posts on it, but I still feel a sting of regret that it isn't more.
Six months ago I was talking to my friend Dave Gorum. He insisted that I send him some of my writing that I hadn't published. So I went through and put together a folder of pieces that ranged from 40% to 100% completed. In the end I sent him 71 unpublished posts (and there were more I didn't send).
I always presumed (and hoped) that at a certain age I would feel a sense of authority over writing about ideas. I keep expecting to cross some kind of threshold where my thinking feels more valid, but now that I've cracked 30 I'm accepting that it simply won't happen. I've reached the point of shrugging and thinking "this is what I've got, I guess."
The way my brain processes the world is through writing. Even if it never touches a piece of paper or word processor, I'm unavoidably organizing ideas into sentences and paragraphs.
The problem with writing is that it's self-indulgent. To think your ideas are worthwhile is arrogant. But an even worse version of this arrogance is when it never gets smacked down by reality. Writing that isn't published stays contained inside the pressure cooker of your mind and slowly rots into anger and disdain. Anger at yourself for not doing anything with the writing, and disdain for the people who, despite all their flaws, manage to hit the publish button.
Back to Dave: in March he told me to start publishing my writing. So I went and followed his advice by stopping to write entirely.
My response to being encouraged by a friend was to throw up as many barriers to actually publishing things as possible. The result of this is that now, half a year later, I've moved off of Medium (to my own site) and set up a mailing list (with Buttondown).
All this to say that I'm going to try writing more. Or rather, publishing more.
Saying this aloud is a violation of my personal cardinal rule of blogging: never talk about how long it's been since you posted or talk about how you're planning on writing more. Statements like this are a trademark of dead blogs and blogs belonging to people actually uninterested in writing. But since this is a newsletter, not a blog post, and I have enough of a track record over six years I figure I'll let myself indulge a little.
For my first post on my new site I thought I'd share something I wrote six years ago: what I wrote after I lost my job. It's more of a diary entry than a blog post. I cleaned it up a bit since I don't think I ever really edited it—mostly bad grammar, etc.—but otherwise it's the same dusted-off six-year-old file that's just been sitting there.
The most surprising thing is that I'm not really embarrassed to read it. Though I feel profoundly different about so many things, the thoughts and feelings in the piece don't feel disingenuous. That person who wrote it is still to a large extent who I am. Perhaps actually sharing your writing is in large part about accepting that.
Here's the post: https://blog.benedictfritz.com/the-day-i-lost-my-job
Talk soon,
Benedict
p.s. please reply to these e-mails! They should route to my personal e-mail address, and I'd love to talk to you :)