It is the last minutes of 11pm on 1/11. The house is quiet, I have some time to take a moment for myself, and I'm posting some words online, something I haven't done in a long while.

I used to write all the time. Newsletters, blog posts, scattered thoughts on social media. The words flowed easily then, when life had more margins, more breathing room between obligations. There used to be more space in my life for quiet thought. For writing that went nowhere. For ideas that served no one but myself. I don't remember exactly when that space closed, only that one day I looked up and realized it had been gone for years.

It wasn't a dramatic decision. Life just changed shape.

--

The internet changed first. Every platform I'd once loved started rotting from within. Social media became cesspools of rage and algorithmic manipulation. Everyone migrated to TikTok and Instagram Reels with its endless streams of content designed to keep you scrolling, never satisfied, always hungry for the next hit. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming; if anything destroys a muse, it's this.

I enjoy the occasional dopamine hit as much as anyone else. I'm even married to a content creator. But the constant noise led me to withdraw. I felt overwhelmed by "content." Add AI slop to the mix, and I didn't feel like the world needed any more of it from me.

Then I became a parent. Suddenly, whatever spare time I thought I had evaporated. Caring for a toddler is all-consuming in ways I never imagined, and I don't mean this as a complaint, only as fact. The tantrums, the weight of being a default parent, the relentless logistics, the invisible mental load of keeping a small human thriving and a family functioning. And for someone with as little social capacity as me (read: an introvert who gives everything he has during the day), I'm so spent by evening that it becomes impossible to do anything but crash.

In the last few years too, I started a job that came with new boundaries. I found myself self-censoring, second-guessing, wondering if certain thoughts or observations should even be written. After a while, it was easier to just not write at all.

The combination closed something in me. My football games became less frequent. The long walks that once cleared my mind disappeared. Any small victories carved from chaos felt like maintenance. I felt it but never admitted it until recently. The space for my own creative exploration closed. Not because anyone took it from me. But because I let it slip away, piece by piece, in the face of everything else that felt more urgent, more necessary, more real.

--

Charlotte Shane wrote about how creative people disavow what is most dear to them as an ultimate and forbidden indulgence. We convince ourselves we don't deserve quietude or ease. We estrange ourselves from what we desperately need.

Then she asks the questions that cut through the noise: If you give up your art, what will you replace it with? Where does that energy go? Is writing really in the top five most frivolous things you do?

I was browsing through old journal entries recently and saw that this guilt has been eating at me for a while. This feeling that I couldn't make space for myself while others needed me. But Shane's questions expose the fallacy: What good came from my depleted state? What was prevented when I had no creative outlet? The answer is nothing.

When I honestly answer her questions, I realize that writing isn't a frivolous activity. Falling into algorithmic rabbit holes is. Forfeiting creation didn't serve anyone. It was self-punishment disguised as virtue. Creative guilt is a false penance.

There's a phrase from Mundo Mendo that won't leave me alone: personal work serves as the motor, secret sauce, and reason for creative success. It is work done without thinking about audience, reach, compensation, or external elements.

This isn't separate from "real work." It is real work. James Hillman calls it "soul-work," or work of the imagination where joy and fantasy participate, without forethought of product or profit. The value isn't in productivity or measurable outcomes. The process itself, unvalidated by external measures, generates the most meaningful and sustainable creative output.

It's clearing up for me that I need somewhere to think, to be, to explore beyond the roles of caregiver, employee, fixer. This is the work that prevents mind-explosion.

--

To do this work that I cannot not do, I need to carve out physical and temporal boundaries to protect the psychic space necessary for it. Maybe creating this space is escapism, but it's also preparation for meaningful engagement with the world.

I'm thinking of a space that allows me to do for the sake of doing, or as Charlotte Shane puts it, "like a child singing quietly in the bathtub." A space to play, be messy, break a few things. A space to create for myself, which isn't selfishness but the wellspring from which genuine creative work and authentic expression flows. I am inspired by what Mandy Brown writes about how writing on your own site has different affordances than typing into a little box on social media. You're not surrounded by other people's thinking, but "located within your own body of work."

So I'm claiming space again. A corner. A garden of zeros and ones. A place where I can be unfinished, uncertain, exploring. This site will change and evolve. It may have an audience of one. Posts might get updated, revised, even retracted. And the writing here exists in what Brown describes as a "third state," beyond draft and published, but "in the world, still evolving."

I don't know exactly what this practice will look like yet. Maybe daily notes that never get published. Maybe weekly reflections that occasionally surface. Maybe just protecting weekend late nights for thinking, before the week's demands rush back in. Not because I have everything figured out, or infinite time or energy, or because the guilt has disappeared entirely. But because the alternative serves no one. Because somewhere between everyone and everything that needs me, there must be room for myself.

Welcome.