Why I Love Shitty Drafts: A Stream of Consciousness
I wrote this piece as a stream of consciousness during my morning writing session on 6/18/2021, and for once, what I wrote felt more-or-less complete, and I was more-or-less happy with. So here it is. Any edits were restricted to punctuation and minor grammatical corrections.
I didn’t feel like writing anything this morning, so here I am writing a whole lot of nothing. The only thing that really matters for the next hour is that I write, that I continue making these wonderful flourishes with my pen and watch this page come to life with the words that are spilling out of me. In truth, I’m just quite tired, and I would prefer not to have to parse my thoughts in the present moment. It turns out that biking for two and a half hours total to relax, read, and write at a park 10 miles from your apartment can be quite draining, especially if you follow it up with no more than 4 hours of sleep. I’m definitely not in peak form today, luckily when it comes to my writing, I don’t always have to be.
In fact, I don’t always have to be in peak form in general. I’m allowed to have bad days. I’m allowed to fall down and stay down for a little bit because maybe I need a nap. That’s okay. As long as I stand back up once I’m rested, but I am allowed to rest whenever I need to. I’m allowed to underperform for days or weeks at a time because we can’t always demand or expect excellence from ourselves and others every single day; that’s simply not realistic.
Especially for artists or even athletes. It takes having a lot of bad days to become great. If I am going to become one of the world’s greatest writers — which I am actively striving for — then I am going to have to write a lot of shitty, terrible, and cliché pieces to eventually find the gem that will allow me to be remembered in the time after my passing. It will take a lot of panning in the dirt to find those stories, poems, and prose pieces that will be something I am proud of for my legacy to be based off of.
I think the funniest and most freeing thing in the writing world is the notion of a shitty first draft. This terrible thing that we write to take the ideas, images, and storylines that we each have in our heads and just get them onto paper, however they come out. It’s a useful trick because it alleviates the stress associated with the notion of perfection and the idea of excellence; its simply about creation and progress, and resting easy in the understanding that no one will ever read that shitty draft — at least not until you die; unless you destroy the drafts which seems a tad extreme, you never know what inspiration you may take from it later.
It is that last bit that makes these shitty drafts so amusing to me. As individuals, especially now in the Internet Age, we are always trying to craft a persona for the world around us to consume. This idealized version of our individuality is always what we take with us when we leave the house or go to make a post on our social media pages, as it is with the art produced by a creative. The world receives the idealized version of our art. They don’t see the drafts, the sketches, the uncompleted pieces haunting our closets; at least not while we’re alive. We can only present the idealized fiction of our lives while we are, in fact, alive. Once we’re dead, they’ll tell whatever stories about us they wish, and for the admired artists, there will inevitably be those who scour whatever possessions they might find — drafts, journals, personal effects — in an attempt to understand the artist underneath the identity they had constructed for society.
We’re all constructing identities and donning masks when we step out into the world. Consciously or otherwise, we are each constantly making minor or major adjustments to the person we portray ourselves to be depending on the circumstances. For instance, I recently began to develop a consistent post schedule for Instagram, so I might become a proper internet influencer. In making that decision, I also made the choice that I would aim to present the most authentic version of myself to the world. In that effort, I’ve started taking time lapse videos of me just living my life, typically only when I am engaged in activities like reading, writing, or yoga, and I will likely extend that to my work sessions — potentially even sleeping. While my goal with all that is to attempt to break the fourth wall of the internet and bring the audience into my life, even, though perhaps especially, the messy bits, the untidy bits, but the reality is that I’ve already noticed how even just recording my writing sessions and yoga practices are already modifying my personal behaviors. So, what happens if I turn my life into a time-lapsed reality TV show with a single camera angle?
It’s something I’m deeply intrigued by at an intellectual level, but I am certainly worried about how it might affect my mental health in the long term. What if it’s something I get addicted to? What if I develop an over inflated sense of my own self-worth? Or worse, what if I manage to develop a cult of personality around myself? I can think of anything more disruptive and disastrous for the causes I care to advance than me moving them forward purely based on the power of my personality, especially because I don’t know if I have the strength or humility to let go of that power once I have it if I get it.
What scares me about all of this, is that I want that power, and I would wield it to fight for justice and equity. Yet, inevitably, I will grow old and, as happens with all of today’s radical and revolutionaries, become the reactionary of tomorrow. If I get power as a young radical, will they be able to wrest it from my hands when I am the elder statesman fighting to preserve the past? I certainly hope so, but even more, I hope I never abandon the ever-expanding Black Radical Tradition.
