The Great Facade

Every day like clockwork, I copy a small text file out of a staging directory. Shortly thereafter, a Python script pulls the contents of that file out, parses it, and then places each line into a webpage that then gets pushed up to a server managed by a good friend of mine. Within a few seconds of that page going live, the handy Bitly bookmarklet gives me a shortened URL that I then send out to the world thanks to the magic of Tweetbot.

Every day, I publish a new article to my website — like clockwork. But although it may appear so, I cannot remember the last time I wrote every day — like clockwork — for it has been quite some time indeed. Instead, I hoard each morsel of prose like an animal driven by instinct to prepare for winter or perish in the face of it. But why? Why do I feel the need to keep up a facade of consistency when my life and schedule as a writer is anything but consistent?

Every time I find something to write about, I finish the article and store it away so as to conform to a strict schedule of one post per day. Although I may have read about a black market college admissions essay writer one week, for example, as far as everyone else is concerned I came upon it an entire week later; and such is the case with nearly everything I write. But why? What drives this primordial urge to conform to a set pattern and put forth the semblance of professionalism in an area that I feel anything but professional?

Unfortunately, I have no idea. Perhaps it stems from convention, or from a desire to emulate those whom I admire. Regardless of where this desire comes from though, one thing is for sure: I hate it. I hate going to bed after emptying the last article in my queue and wondering how I will meet the next day’s quota, as if there were some horrible force that I had to keep at bay through my writing alone. There is no greater self-imposed source of guilt in my life right now than failing to meet my own expectations in this one area, and I’m tired of it. It has wore me down, and I’m done.

For the past two weeks, I have immersed myself in another side of the internet — one previously unfamiliar to myself and almost undoubtedly alien to most of the people who follow me and read this website. Despite its unfamiliarity though, it has captured my interest and enthusiasm in a way that few topics ever have, and to such a degree that no other subject has managed since before I started writing here. I have thought of little else for two weeks, and have devoted every spare moment to it; however, I did so to much consternation on my part, because focusing there meant that I was not writing — that I was not working to meet my self-imposed expectations.

Over the past two weeks, then, I have managed to turn a great source of joy in my life, writing, into a worrying source of distress — and for what? This is the third time I have asked that question in this article, the umpteenth time I have asked it over the past fourteen days, and perhaps the hundredth time I have asked it of myself in the last month or two. Each time I ask it, though, I come up with the same answer. That is to say, none. And so, today, I’m done asking it — I’m doing asking it, and I’m done causing it to be asked. From here on out I choose to write about what I want, when I want to; with this I choose to eschew my selfish regimen and approach this intensely personal task as it should be: with reverence and respect.

Think of this as a warning, for you have now been warned. From here on out, anything goes. I extend this a courtesy to you, dear reader, because I consider you deserving of some notice before I take this train down a path that could very well derail it from the route you have climbed on in expectation of. Today, I break the carefully-crafted facade; today, this truly becomes my website. I hope you will stick around, but I will not hold it against you if you choose not to.