Why Are All My Essays Sad?

You may have noticed my absence from this blog (if I am lucky enough to have an audience that cares). There are multiple reasons I haven't posted for a while, to do with scheduling and other commitments, but the biggest one is simply: I cannot seem to finish an essay on a high note. 

Right now I have four essays in production, and every one of them is stalled because despite trying to make this a space for defiant joy shining out against the misery of our crumbling world, every single piece I have tried to draft has skewed towards the bummer end of the happiness scale. I frontload them with jokes, I try to satirize and poke fun at power, and I explore my idea of an interesting angle on a subject - and in that part of the essay, everything seems to fall apart. 

Why The Long Words? 

(This is meant to be a pun on "long face", not an admission of purple prose. The fact I feel the need to explain the joke means I should probably cut it, but fuck the rules, let me have my dumb pun goddammit).

I love video essays (I am that kind of pretentious bitch), but I find if I watch enough of them, I end up in the same emotional ditch: despair. Each essay is funny, sharp, intelligent, beautifully crafted; their topics range from the global toilet flush that is capitalism's death spiral, to visual storytelling in games, to just putting taken-for-granted concepts like lifelong monogamous love under a microscope. Some are exceptionally silly (putting cruise lines against one another to figure out the least depressing way to slowly die), some are bizarre (the dramatic history of a white collar scam fronted by a cleaning company), some are hauntingly beautiful (if you are over 30, I dare you to watch I Don't Know James Rolfe by Dan Olsen (aka Folding Ideas) and not viscerally feel the passage of time and fleeting nature of your disappated dreams, once so concrete, now memories). And so it is with my own essays: despite the humour, the honest attempt, not to feebly silver line, but to find actionable truth and meaningful, resilient signals in whatever noise I happen to be dissecting, I get to the midpoint and feel a sudden slump into foggy despair. 

I chose to wrestle with this publicly for two reasons: one, because dialogue is the only method I have for processing my thoughts, even if I'm the only one speaking, or even listening; and two, because I wonder how many of us have struggled with this exact issue of sustaining a mood throughout a piece. 

Have You Considered, like, Structure? 

(Something I said to myself internally in an incredibly West Coast Bitchy drawl)

Blogs are one of the few creative mediums I don't plan super thoroughly, and for good reason. In a blog, I tend to riff on an idea, and as I research or play, new angles spring to mind. Like character building, ideas come to life naturally; with too rigid a structure, I would feel handcuffed to my first thought, which is often the least interesting. That said, this undefined midsection is not a problem I run into with projects* that begin from a very deliberate scaffold. Is there a happy medium between rigid planning and spaghetti-flinging creativity? 

Let's make a public experiment of this concept. For my next post, I will take you behind the scenes of my normal blogging proccess (scribbles, fragmenter sentences, fractured quotes - the vibe-coding of essay writing) and also make a deliberate, if slightly loose, plan of my points, if not by paragraph, then by concept or argument. Tune in this time next week for a brand new essay - and a behind-the-scenes look of how it (hopefully!) came together.

*You haven't missed anything - to be announced soon, on here and my Instagram!