michael-dean-k/

People who think pseudonyms are cowardly probably have no idea how much they subconsciously self-censor. They’re unaware how agent-arena relationship shapes and limits anything they say. To see what true freedom is like, you need to mask the agent in a familiar arena, or, move the agent to a foreign arena. Even someone with a pseudonym settles into a new agent-arena relationship, and needs to experiment with new pseudonyms and/or create new arenas with different constraints.

All mythologies erode. A hope to be Helen of Troy is a hope that doesn’t see the nature of time. A second is a life, a life is a millennium, a millennium an aeon. Antiquity blinked and here we are. In the next blink, all of our greats will be flattened too, with only a misunderstood bust who wishes to be forgotten.

To yearn to be a historical icon worshipped by your grandchildren’s acquaintances is to inflate your ego with puss. It is a corruption of intent, a romantic taste-blindness, like designing your own ocean home on the ground floor of a beach. Beauty is not in the body, but in a soul that aligns with the creative engine from which it emerged. Beauty need not be tangled with admiration. That is vanity, a devil that fills you with confidence for one night before it strips from you everything that you thought mattered. Pair this was fame, and it’s hard to recover. This is why Virginia Woolf walked into a lake with cinderblock shoes. ¹

I write this to remind myself that I can chase beauty in obscurity. I can see nature in the dark with my eyes closed. I can hide in the suburbs and appear painfully ordinary and even pitied by those who live lives of high literature, and that would all be great. It doesn’t matter if my face becomes known or if my words are spread out over untraceable pseudonyms or if a super-intelligence eclipses all future generations of writers, what matters is that I personally pierce through the veils of heaven. It’s an extremely private experience. It’s enough to know that I’ve navigated my life in a way so that, through my own hands, I can produce things of escalating beauty. It is a privilege. I won’t hoard what I make, nor will I parade it.

Attention makes me uneasy, not because I’m weak, but because fame is an abominable condition. I write not to become more known each day, but to see deeper into our circumstance. If it’s legacy you seek, don’t hand down éclat, hand down linguistic viruses that bloom fresh lenses.

In my first 100 days post-WOP, I wrote every day and basically published nothing.

What helped me snap out of that rut was to take on a mindset of "single session publishing." This means I sit down for a writing session and don't stop until it goes on my site (sessions were 2-4 hours). They were effectively first drafts, and sometimes I'd come back to revise them. I didn't "blast" them to my email list, but DM'd them to specific people to start a conversation. There was something about having a body of work on my website that took the pressure off (eventually) sending essays to my larger list.

I'm 100% a perfectionist, and think it's worth having a rigorous, increasing quality standard, but it's important to also have places with much lower standards to serve as your release valve.

Also, publishing under my legal/professional identity came with all sorts of psychological blocks that were completely invisible to me until I started publishing under a pseudonym. Every situation is different, but I wonder if shifting to semi-pseudonymous Substack would help take the pressure off everyeone.

I’m sort of inspired now to create a section on my own Substack called “Drafts.” You can customize that so new subscribers by default aren’t on that list. I currently have an “Experiments” section on my site, but “Drafts” feels a lot more self-explanatory. (Some of these drafts will eventually reach “peak” form and get reposted in the Essay section, but that won’t happen with most of them).