I don't know what I'm doing

Is life just a series of feeling stuck? Escapism, social media, insecurity, etc, oh my.

I am not against escapism. I think a perfectly reasonable part of building a life you love can be sometimes escaping it—emphasis on sometimes.

Lately I’ve caught myself trying to escape too much. Trying, specifically, to escape my work. Sometimes I do this by leaning into other here-and-now activities (like playing with Scout and swimming in the ocean and convincing Sean he wants a three-minute-long hug) which feels fulfilling and reminds me there is so much more to my existence than a career label or an income statement. Other times I do this by consuming books and podcasts and TV shows. When that looks like The Crane Wife or If Books Could Kill, I’m at least briefly sated. When it’s mindless, I only feel hungrier when I surface from my media feast.

The other day while Sean was physically in the office, my best intentions of writing words I’m proud of were foiled by Netflix’s Love is Blind. Wait, let me fix that passive voice: I threw away what I thought were Very Good Productivity plans in favor of binging five episodes where boring Minnesotans not-quite fell in love. At least I made myself lunch, I thought. At least we went for a jog this morning. I am not a total degenerate, see? I deserve this reprieve! (But reprieve from what, I ask my past self? The writing you never shut up about and claim to love so dearly?)

Of course there’s nothing wrong, inherently, with watching some reality dating show if it brings you joy. This is not an article about “highbrow” and “lowbrow” entertainment. It is an essay where I’m trying to figure out why I’m running away from parts of my life I claim bring me meaning and fulfillment… toward those that bear hollowness.

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When I first moved the Paws and Reflect blog to Substack, I didn’t think much about Substack as a social media platform in and of itself. The switch was a more convenient way to handle subscriptions sans worry about a WordPress plugin that seemed to be glitching more and more frequently. I wanted to focus on creativity without logistics slipping through the cracks.

Then I realized how much easier it felt to write here. How welcoming the blank screen was. How the distance from our original dog-focused website, however slight, liberated me. I had few preconceived notions about what was acceptable in this space, and publishing was simpler (I spent a lot of time on search engine optimization and image resizing back on WordPress), and I kept wanting to move away from Instagram anyway—so I figured, okay, why not have the Paws and Reflect Substack be the written version of the Paws and Reflect Instagram? Instead of rambling in story slides and captions, I will centralize all my thoughts here.

I liked this idea. In many ways I still like this idea. This is a personal blog! On purpose! That’s okay!

But then I started spending more time on other writers’ Substack publications—and comparison, that notorious thief, barreled his way in. My confidence cramped up and doubled over. My creativity feels paralyzed.

It’s not that I am experiencing writer’s block. I am almost never “at a loss for words”. My problem is writing quality words. (But like, what does quality even mean?)

I miss my early days on Instagram where I happily wrote captions that rubbed against the character limit, sent them out into the ether, and simply felt like I belonged. I still revised and overthought—it was never totally seamless—but perhaps there was something about not being on a “writing platform” that made my linguistic output feel automatically good enough. It was sort of a bonus.

I miss my early days on Substack (lol, nostalgia for six months ago) where I saw things much the same way. I briefly time-traveled to a golden era of creating just to create, just to connect, before the insidious doubts caught up with me.

Now it feels like pressure once again. There are rules to follow, I’m sure of it, and if I can just find them everything will be wonderful because I am the most excellent rule follower. And then I will stop feeling vaguely unsettled whenever one of our parents asks me how the writing’s going lately.

But where are these rules going to come from? Where do I want them to come from? Would I even listen if they were in front of me and indisputable?

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I started very specifically as the person behind a dog Instagram account, and then became a dog freelance writer, and I now feel slightly unmoored straddling the lines of “content marketing” and “journalism” and “creative writing” (and damn I really thought my journey with Scout had honed me into someone who’s better with ambiguity than this).

I think the truth is I feel threatened by fellow writers. This is a problem for so many reasons but mostly because feeling threatened by someone else’s creativity is a shitty, zero-sum approach with which to meet the world and I am ashamed of the inclination. I keep seeing other people sharing wonderful, thoughtful things—and I keep thinking to myself that I could never create something so wonderful and thoughtful myself. Someone writes eloquently about environmentalism, and I want to write eloquently about environmentalism. Someone writes poignant personal essays, and I want to write poignant personal essays. I want to chameleon match everyone else instead of reminding myself to do what I love, what I am excellent at.

(What am I excellent at?)

So I realize, at almost 28, years after I thought I’d mostly gotten this tendency under control: I am still molding myself to the world around me. This is a necessary part of living in an connected world as a social creature. But how much is too much? Where does inspiration give way to shallow imitation?

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I will be proud of my blog in one breath and sheepish about it the next. It’s been the same on Instagram for ages. The other day a friend and I were talking about our ever-fluctuating opinions and moods, and she asked “do you think maybe we [feel like we] change more than other people because we reflect/introspect/try and articulate the observations so much?”

Yes, I replied. That might be exactly it.

I long for a cohesive narrative—a triumphant story arc—in my own life. But at least part of the reason some lovely dog people decided I was worth talking to a few years ago must have been because I freely shared all the ups and downs. Today Scout and I are on top of the world. Today we had a setback, again. We will keep growing.

I have to stop wanting to be everybody else. I don’t mean that as in “I need to stop conforming to the masses”—I mean it as in I literally need to stop wanting to be everybody around me all at once. We’re all, each of us, only one person.

I am only one person.

I only need to be one person.

(Can I repeat that enough times I start to believe it deep down?)