Stupid, Vapid, Meandering Thoughts

Do you ever just sit down to write an article or a post for this silly little website (or any silly little website, for that matter) and just come up empty? You just can’t get past the first couple establishing sentences? Maybe you have an idea for an article to write, but after the first paragraph, you think, “This is stupid, no one is going to care about this!” Or maybe you just can’t bring yourself to reach that lower word limit. (Eighty-two words so far, Steve. Good job. Over five hundred more to go. You got this.) I’ve been finding this to be the case more and more often, not just with Vocal, but with life in general.

In my personal relationships, especially recently, I have been teased or even chided for not saying much, or not contributing much in a conversation. This is understandable at my office job. I make sure not to mix my day-job up with an active and flourishing personal life. However, this shouldn’t be the case with friends and family, should it? One of my closest friends spills her soul to me, and all I can say is, “That’s rough, buddy,” or attempts to have a deep conversation with me about whatever philosophy of the day exists, and all I can think is, “That’s interesting.” My loved ones attempt to draw some kind of deeper emotional truth out of me, but generally, I don’t think there is one. I think I just want to vibe a lot of the time, and unfortunately, that makes me vapid and uninteresting and unengaging to talk to. I’ve been reduced to water cooler talk with everyone. A tragedy of unimaginable proportions, truly.

And now here I am on Vocal, and I can’t help but think that this avenue, too, this method of transcribing and immortalizing my vapid and meandering thoughts into vapid and meandering words, has also become like a coworker. Recently at my office job, they celebrated multiple coworker birthdays. I wished them their respective happy birthdays, as is the typical decorum, but when my boss excitedly announced cake in the break room, on two separate occasions, I simply could not find the desire in my shallow little heart to join my coworkers—people I don’t dislike, mind you, just people I would rather not spend time with—and instead sat in my cubicle alone, finishing up my quota for the day. Investing social capital into Vocal has—quite counterproductively—become kind of like investing social capital into my coworkers at my “interlude” office job between grad school and moving abroad. I would much rather complete my vapid little tasks than deepen the connections that are available to me. As someone who will be leaving this office soon, this is not a bad instinct to have for this situation, but as someone who wants to eventually make it as a freelance author, or at least supplement his income substantially, the social capital I invest into Vocal is what I will get out of it.

So, I don’t know. I feel like I’m grasping at straws when I continue any interaction, coaxing water from stone or however the saying goes. Are those straws worth grasping for? I think I’ll be better off grasping for them. But, y’all, why does it have to be so difficult?

Even now, I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, what a stupid and meandering article I just wrote.” However, when I used to teach writing, I always used to say, “Guys, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done. You can’t workshop a blank page, and you can’t get something right unless you’ve gotten it wrong a million times.” I guess I just have to start heeding my own stupid advice.