Where Did Balckwell Go?

August 3, 2023

If you’ve spent enough time on the internet, you’ve seen a lot of people give up, and a lot of people disappear. The ease of posting online means that almost everyone below a certain age has left some remnant of their own creativity online. The internet is a place where you are free to dump whatever you have made with no fuss and without getting in anyone’s way. It’s just there.

Inevitably, however, someone will come across what you’ve made. Most likely they will do so by accident, and in many cases won’t even look at what you’ve done. It will appear before them for an instant, and then they will send it away with a scroll or a click. All of us see thousands of posts a day from thousands of different people who just want someone to see what they’ve done. They may want you to see it because they’re proud of it, or because they’re insecure about it. They may want you to see it because you seeing it makes them money. Often, it’s a combination of all three.

It’s easy to get discouraged posting online. In person, you can show your work to someone and at least force some sort of response, even if it’s simply polite acknowledgement. It’s not particularly satisfying, but at least you get to talk to someone. When you post online, what you get back is a number. This number tells you how many people have seen your work. Usually, it’s low. Sometimes it’s a little bit higher than usual, and you think, “Wow, that’s nice.” However, in the end, it’s just a different number. There’s no real qualitative difference here. You put your heart into a means of human communication, and what you get in return is mathematics.

It’s easy to get discouraged posting online. It’s easy to give up. There’s nothing keeping you here. One day, you can just stop posting, and there’s no way for anyone to know what happened. Did you die? Did you decide you didn’t like what you were doing? Or did you just figure that it wasn’t worth it anymore — that what you’re putting into this isn’t worth what you get in return? There’s no reason to tell anyone, because they weren’t listening anyway. Off you go.

You find remnants of these unceremonious exits all over the place. Websites with ten or fifteen posts, each rising in quality as the vision clicks into place, and then… The last post was two years ago. You to go the About page. You go to the Contact page. You search the name on Twitter. There they are: they’re still tweeting. They’re tweeting like nothing ever happened, like they’ve forgotten that they ever even tried. And they’re hoping that you forgot too.

It’s embarrassing to give up. It’s embarrassing because it means that you tried and no one cared and then you let that stop you. It’s hard to tell which part of it is the most embarrassing, really: the trying or the giving up. At least the giving up has some sort of rational foundation. You can justify it using cost-benefit analysis. You can talk about the unlikelihood of success, and the insanity of doing the same thing, over and over, and hoping for a different outcome.

Trying in the first place involved a leap of faith, an irrational belief that somehow, someway, you would reach someone. And when you take a leap of faith and fall flat on your face, you look like a dope.

All of my projects are a constant battle against giving up. I’ve been setting up and taking down websites since I was sixteen years old. I’ve been writing books that barely reach two thousand words. I’ve been posting videos and getting five views, and posting podcasts and getting two. I wrote an essay in 2016 about this feeling of beating my head against a brick wall. That was seven years ago.

I’ve been giving up over and over and over for so long that it’s almost comical. I started my first website twelve years ago, and here I am, still posting my writing online, and still reaching a quantity of people that could probably fit in my two-bedroom apartment. (It is quite spacious for a two-bedroom.)

So what am I still doing here, after giving up all these times? On the one hand: well, I guess I can’t help it. I write and I want to share what I’ve written. I read and I want to talk about what I’ve read. It’s as simple as that.

But there’s more here as well. I’ve learned about giving up. Whenever I give up, I look back a few years later and think, “That was a good idea,” or, “That was fun,” and I wonder why I stopped doing it. I was improving over time, and there were usually at least a few people who enjoyed what I was doing. What happened was that I let myself become overwhelmed with negative, discouraging thoughts: no one cares, you’re no good, there’s no point. I deeply regret every time that I let that stop me, and I refuse to let it happen again.

I’ve also seen people give up, and I’ve wished with all my heart that they hadn’t. I’ve seen people whose work inspired me disappear completely. It hurts. I feel like I know why they did it, and hey, maybe they’re even better off this way. But it still hurts, because what they were doing was important to me, and they probably didn’t recognize that what they were doing was important to anyone at all, and maybe that’s why they gave up on it.

I’ve said this many times before, but the reason I write is because reading is what convinced me that I was a real human being. I thought no one could understand me, and that I couldn’t understand anyone else. I thought I was completely alone. I read deeply truthful words that had poured out of someone’s heart and realized that their heart looked a lot like mine. I write with the hope that my words can reach others in the same way.

Here’s the problem: I will never believe that I have succeeded. I’ve received some incredibly nice e-mails and comments over the past year or so, whether that’s about my writing here, my podcast, or my novel. The ones about my novel are the most impactful and the most satisfying, but all of these words fill me with joy. I think about all of the people that I wish I had told how I feel about their work, and I am awed by the kindness of the people who choose to reach out to me. I can’t express how much I appreciate it.

But I’m here, and everyone else is somewhere else. When I’m by myself, and the comments aren’t on my screen, and the people who believe in me aren’t by my side, you better believe that I think about giving up. I put so much energy and passion into what I’m doing here. I hold everything I do to a very high standard. While it may seem like I just sit here and plop out some words and then throw them on this website, these essays (and my show) and my novels)) are built on mountains of discarded drafts.

On top of that is the emotional toll of knowing that I am putting myself out there, and that I am making myself vulnerable to people, and that at any point someone could show up and hate my guts and decide they need to tell me about it. That hasn’t happened, but I can’t ignore the possibility that it might. Anyone can swoop in and say anything they please about my work. I have given them all the tools to understand exactly how stupid or wrong or misguided I am about everything I think.

It makes me want to run away, sometimes. It makes me want to erase it all and just disappear somewhere where no one can ever think about me. It makes me want to keep everything to myself. Why do I insist on inflicting myself on the world? What good does it do me? What good does it do anyone?

The difference between me now, and me all those times that I gave up, is that I now have the ability to fight these thoughts. While putting myself out there makes me the potential object of ridicule, it is also the only way for me to receive the support I need to keep going. I never used to tell anyone that I wrote at all. I just kept it to myself. And when I did so, the negative thoughts always won, because there was nothing to fight them with. As I’ve gained confidence, I’ve been able to enlist more people on my team. With every word of support, I’m able to expand my circle wider and wider.

I won’t give up. I can’t give up. I’ve got to keep doing my best!

BALCKWELL RISING!!!!