I tend to write these posts first thing in the morning, when the rest of the house is still asleep; there’s something about that space, that stillness, that allows my brain to unravel in the way that it’s easier to share here — I feel less self-conscious about using the time so selfishly, perhaps, knowing that everyone else isn’t even awake yet. (One of the joys of being an early riser, I guess. Go figure.)
More specifically, I tend to write these posts first thing in the morning on the weekend, and schedule them out far in advance. That’s not always the case — I’ve written about my three week buffer of posts in the past, but recent events have meant that I’ve been writing posts day of publishing, in part out of a need to shout into the void, in part because what had originally been scheduled felt especially meaningless and facile in comparison — but, more often than not, it’s a Saturday or Sunday morning where I’ll write what will eventually appear here.
A lot of this is because of the way my brain works. Writing during the main part of the day feels like it needs to have more purpose, like it needs to be for someone or something else: that it’s work, or it’s Wait, What? and not just me writing for my own needs. I can’t explain why that feels true, but it does; let’s just go with it.
But there’s also a thing where, for the most part, I save this writing for the weekend because the weekday mornings are for reading, whether it’s the news or social media (which is, I increasingly feel, still the news, just in a different format), or research for some particular purpose. It’s not reading for pleasure — that’s an evening activity, or, again something I do on weekend mornings — but reading with the intent of learning and searching out new information that I’m going to need in the short term.
None of this scheduling or organized methodology was planned, or even formalized until I started thinking about it recently, but somehow, I’ve ended up with a system where there’s a very clear demarcation between my input and my output, and what kind of both goes when. My subconscious is far more organized than the rest of me.