First Plop

I have teeth. Teeth that I use every day! Teeth that require an annoying amount of maintenance (and special Luxury Bone Insurance) to keep.

Teeth that require daily brushing with toothpaste.

I also have ADHD, which means that most days, I’m lucky if I even remember the concept of toothpaste exists, much less remember to put the cap back on when I’m done using it.

This means that more often than not, in order to get to the part of the ritual where I am actually engaging in Luxury Bone maintanance, I usually have to take a moment to squeeze out the crusty, dried out blob of goop that forms at the end of my toothpaste tube.

This is not a pleasant process, but I’ve accepted it as a necessary evil if I don’t want to fork over entire paychecks to pay someone to stick drills, tiny loud vacuum straws, and foul-tasting dental glue in my mouth to repair the damage brought by entropy, bacteria, and a deep love of sugary snacks.

Over the past few years, I went through a lot of Bad Things that made short-term survival take up all of my available mental and emotional resources. I survived (yay!) and I’m slowly working to reestablish the routines and habits that decayed while I was crawling my way through the darkness. Daily toothpaste gloop-purging is one of those routines.

Creativity is another.

I don’t remember who it was that gave me this piece of wisdom, but when I was younger and dead-set on becoming the next Douglas Adams, I remember anxiously ranting to a prolific, published novelist friend of mine about how I wanted to produce more stories, but everything that was coming out of me at that time was absolute garbage. I wanted to troubleshoot what was wrong so I could start churning out my own novel.

They informed me that there was nothing to troubleshoot. Writing a bunch of garbage is the first step to writing a good novel.

It’s like toothpaste. You’ve got to push out that thick crust of dried out goop before the useful stuff starts flowing.

I’ve spent the past few years unable to really access my cretaive self, which means that I’ve lost a lot of the progress I’d made so far in getting to the smooth, minty cream of my creative potential (okay, look, I’m trying to do A Thing here with the visceral language I’m using in this toothpaste metaphor, but typing “cream of my creative potential” grossed even myself out. But hey, I’ve gotta push onward. That’s kinda the whole point of this rant, which I’m sure you’ve gotten by now. You seem like a smart reader. Well dressed, too. I dig the discheveled, pantsless look).

In trying to get back to my life and restart the parts of myself that had to shut down while I was operating in Safe Mode, I’ve been facing a lot of perfectionism. I want to write, but I want to write to my standards. I built high standards for myself when I was regularly writing… and then those standards continued to grow and mature and become wild and untamable while I went through the rough times. My inner critic is buffer than it has ever been. My shame and self-sabotage is SWOLE.

For example: I’m aware this post is way too long and rambly. I’m not a fan of how I started with all this talk about my teeth and then very abruptly switched halfway through to talk about creativity. Why did I hide the ball? This post was about creativity from the jump. Why did I write this whole confessional about my personal hygine struggles first? I know that in today’s TikTok-driven world, I need to get to the point in the first 0.00005 seconds or I’ll lose my audience. To be honest, if anyone is reading this far, I feel like they must either have questionable taste in media, a crush on me, a great adderall prescription, or they’re being paid to do so (hi, Siobhan!). Or they’re me, in the future. (Spoiler: That last audience is the only one I care about. But we’ll get to that. And by we I mean me and future me, but if you stick around for the ride, hey. Glad to have you).

My point is that every time I sit down to try and create something that feels good and feels like it’s spinning up the same gears I used to use at my creative peak all of those critical thoughts start gumming up the works and I shut down before I even start.

So. SO. It is time for me to refamilirize myself with the process of unapologetically churning out some absolute garbage. It is time to embrace the goop-pushing stage of this journey. It’s time to trust that eventually, if I keep pushing, I’m going to get back to the good stuff. Maybe even better stuff than I had before. We’re talking real, premium-quality, smooth and creamy art goop. (Oh god I did it again. I made it weird, didn’t I? I hope you’re enjoying this, future me. This seems like the kind of gross weirdo stuff you’d laugh at.)

That is what this project is about.

Every week, I’m making a promise to myself that I’m going to post something here. I’d like to aim for at least two stories per month, since narrative seems to be the artform I miss engaging in the most and is also the artform that I’m the most terrified of trying again. But I’ll also do other things, too! Maybe I’ll post doodles, or songs. Bad poetry! Hand-crafted dad jokes! Or even just earnest ramblings like this one. It’s all toothpaste to me, baby.

I’m putting this on my public (shitpost) website because I want to break past the shame and accept that I will not die if someone sees me making mediocre art. I will not be banned from the creative world if every work I touch isn’t Objectively Brilliant. It’s okay to be bad at things. It’s okay to just have fun!

But, this project isn’t for you, dear audience. At least not right now. Maybe in the future it will be! But right now, the only audience I care about is the one who I’m doing all this work for — future me. The me with the easier-flowing toothpaste. The me who will (I hope) look back at this nonsense with good humor and compassion and grattitude because I’m willing to be an absolute ass-clown and put myself through what will I’m sure at times be a truly excruciating ritual of sub-standard creation. Because I believe in that me. That’s right, future me. I believe in you. And I’m not afraid to say it! Publicly, even! Sure, it’s the very bottom of this extremely long, rambling post, so there’s a good chance no one but you will ever see me say it. But baby steps, right? I believe in you. And I can’t wait to read the weird and wondeful things you create once I’ve cleared out some of this goop.

#InToothpasteWeTrust

(and by we I mean current me and future me… you got that, right? Of course you did. Again, you’re clearly very smart. But also a little dehydrated. Maybe drink some water. And stop picking at that spot. You’re only going to make it worse!)