why I hate writing.

and why I still do it.

There are few metamorphoses I’ve undergone quite like the one I experienced the first time I wrote something that I thought was excellent. Once I did that, I felt like I set a standard that everything else I wrote had to live up to or transcend. The problem is, excellence is pain. And for me, writing is the process of torturing myself until excellent ideas pour from my mind like blood gushing from a wound.

I know that not everyone who writes has this same perspective, and that’s beautiful. I also don’t mean to make it seem like I don’t take any joy in writing. Writing was my first craft. The first thing I ever truly took care to do well. At the same time, once I made the decision that I was going to do it well, The Watcher took over.

The Watcher is the person living inside your mind that judges and evaluates everything you do. It’s what Freud called the superego. It’s the voice that rouses you out of complacency and claims lordship over your instincts. Once I decided to become a writer, that voice became audible. Every piece I’ve written has been completed under its unrelenting gaze.

The Watcher is the reason why I made this Substack months ago with the intention of writing frequently, but have only published one time besides the essay you’re reading right now. Any idea or thought that doesn’t meet its lofty standards is banished to the recesses of my mind. That was OK. Pretty cliche though. Do you even care about what you’re writing about? There are middle schoolers writing more compelling things than whatever this is. If you’re going to write something down, it says, then you should write down excellence. But that’s not true. Few things that are written down are excellent, and even fewer things that are written down are excellent the first time that they are written down. This is a lesson that writing software has taught me actually. If it were possible to design and implement robust systems correctly the first time we built them, then millions of software engineers and computer scientists wouldn’t exist. Maybe one day they won’t, but I’ll discuss that another day.

As painful as The Watcher makes the process of writing, if a blue, Will Smith looking genie gave me three wishes, being rid of The Watcher would not be one. Because of The Watcher, I’ve written some of my favorite, most resonant pieces. I’m less prolific than I would be otherwise, but I have a greater attention to detail when it comes to my writing, and that means I can speak more concisely and distill far more potent brews of ideas. Without The Watcher, I would probably give misinformed, wrongheaded takes on things that I really didn’t understand (I still do that, but I would definitely do it way more). The Watcher gives my writing focus, edge, and acuity.

For better or for worse, it makes writing feel like my brain is being pressed up against a grindstone.

There are so many ways that I could’ve written this piece. Even now, as I write this conclusion, a nearly infinite tree of decisions spans before me. I see ways that I could subvert everything that I’ve said up to this point to give this piece a different meaning; I see intricate tapestries of metaphors, similes, and double entendres. Each beautiful and profound in their own way. And the fact that I can only choose one is why I hate writing.

The fact that I get to choose any at all is why I love it.