One: I don't like when it looks like nothing
This post is part of Blaugust 2026. There's a lot of great writing happening. You should check it out.
There's a technique I use for writing when the Overthinking starts doing its slow migration from background process to full occupying force: just start typing. No little architect standing at the blueprint table demanding the sentence justify itself before it's allowed to exist. Stream of consciousness. You let the hand move and you trust that whatever crawls out from under the floorboards of your skull has more to say than the Committee that usually vets these things before they reach daylight.
I've been trying the same trick with sketching. Intuitive art. The theory is identical: bypass the Committee. Let the hand know something the mind hasn't cleared yet, let it drag the thing up by the root before the light can get a good look and start asking it questions.
And it works. Mostly. Right up until the piece is finished and sitting there, scratched and unrepentant on the page like something that clawed its way out and immediately regretted it, and something in my chest curdles because it doesn't look like anything.
Which... hang on. Sit with that for a second... It took me an embarrassingly long lap to figure what was happening. Abstract art is one of my favorite things a human being can make. I can stand in front of a Rothko and feel something the size of weather move through me, some pressure system with no eye and no mercy. I don't ask the Rothko what it's of. I don't stand there demanding it cash out into A Thing before I'll grant it permission to exist. I extend it total, unconditional artistic trust β the kind you'd extend to a god you've decided, for your own sanity, not to look at directly.
My own smears of color get hauled in front of a tribunal. What is this supposed to be, the tribunal wants to know, robes rustling, as if the entire point of the exercise, bypassing the Committee (the whole reason we're here), hadn't been quietly reinstated by a second, sneakier Committee wearing the first one's trench coat calling itself Taste.
When someone else's work looks like nothing, I read it as intention and confidence. A choice made by someone who has earned the right to withhold representation, because surely β surely β they could paint The Thing if they wanted to, and chose the void instead. My own work looks like nothing but it isn't a choice to me, is it. It's not this is what emerged. It's this is what I couldn't finish turning into something real. One shouldn't hang a stillbirth. One should mourn it.
We dress these internal battles up as discernment when they're probably closer to a merciless little melee with ourselves; critics with staves, waiting in the dark behind the easel. With myself. It took years to actually feel β not just say, feel β that what I write and how I write are a for-real choice and not a pile of text that happened to condense out of the air in front of me like something summoned rather than made. I forget the whole ugly part in the middle, the part where I'd self-flagellate and throw out hundreds of words before ever pressing "post." I'm not going to suddenly grant myself that same mercy in a medium where I have several fewer decades of scar tissue?
And yet the thing above is at least the fifth attempt at something that didn't flat-out disgust me. I erased the others. They were digital. No paper trail. No body. They did no harm to me, to my hard drive, to anyone or anything that ever got to exist long enough to be haunted by them.
And yet.
And yet.
I do not like when things look like nothing. But I'm fine when things read like nothing. Fragments. False starts.
The whole sΓ©ance of half-finished sentences β as long as...
Maybe it is not that I distrust the void. Rather I've made a small, ugly religion out of trusting the void, so long as it arrives dressed in something I already know how to forgive.