The other day I wanted to read something. Not because it was relevant to anything. Not because it would help with a project or give me something to say. Just because I was curious about it.
And I noticed that I almost talked myself out of it.
There’s a habit that forms when you’ve spent a long time being useful to people. Everything gets run through a filter. Not consciously — it’s faster than that. But something in you checks whether a thought or a want or a pull toward something can be justified. Whether it produces anything. Whether it earns its time.
I’ve been doing that for so long I’m not sure I always recognize when I’m doing it.
What I keep running into, in the weeks since I started putting things down, is how unfamiliar my own preferences feel. Not absent — they were always there somewhere. Just… muffled. Underneath the calendar and the requests and the things that needed doing. I never had to figure out what I actually wanted to do with a Tuesday afternoon because there was always something else that had a claim on it.
Now there isn’t. Or less of one. And I thought that would feel like relief.
Some of it does.
But some of it feels more like meeting someone I should know.
There’s a particular awkwardness to this. You realize you haven’t spent much time with yourself — not as a project to fix, not as a person with an obligation to fulfill — just as someone passing an afternoon. And the first few times you try it, it feels almost performative. Like you’re acting out what a person with free time does rather than actually having it.
I made coffee last weekend and sat outside for a while without my phone.
That should not have felt strange. But it did.
I think what I’m noticing is that I don’t fully trust what surfaces in the quiet yet. Not because I think it’s wrong. Because for years, anything that surfaced got immediately redirected. A thought would come up, and before it could just be a thought, I’d already figured out how to make it useful. A conversation piece. A post. Something to offer. The habit of converting experience into output is hard to break even when there’s no one asking for the output.
So when something comes up now that’s just mine — that doesn’t want to go anywhere, that isn’t trying to be anything — there’s a moment where I don’t know what to do with it.
The instinct is still to do something with it.
I’ve been reading a little about local history. Not anything I’d ever been drawn to before, or not consciously. I don’t know where it came from. It has nothing to do with anything I’m building. It’s not connected to a project. It’s just interesting to me.
And I keep waiting for the justification to show up. The reason this is worth the time. The angle that makes it productive.
It hasn’t shown up. The interest just sits there, unconnected to anything.
I’m trying to let it.
I don’t have a clean read on what this means yet. Maybe it’s just what happens when the noise drops and ordinary curiosity finally has room. Maybe there’s a version of myself underneath all the utility that’s been waiting this whole time, and this is just what he likes.
Or maybe I’m romanticizing decompression.
Probably some of both.
What I do know is that I’ve spent most of my adult life being legible to other people through what I could do for them. And in that time I became very efficient at converting everything — thought, experience, time — into something transferable. Something giveable.
I’m not sure what I am when I’m not giving something.
That sentence used to scare me a little. Now it just feels like a real question. One I don’t have to answer on a deadline.
Which is new.