On resonance

A decade or so ago, I was friends with someone who liked to knit a lot. She was never without some project in her lap, moving at mach speed. Then she got her dream job, hired to make knitting patterns, and loved it until she didn’t, and then really didn’t, and then she approached me. “Why am I miserable? You work in a creative field. Are you happy?” And I mean, this person asked me this question when I was being high-key abused by a terrible boss, so no, I was not happy, but I was also happy performing creative work for my career in a general sense, so the answer was rather complicated, because late capitalism always makes things complicated. I think about her often, you know? How you can do a thing, and then you do it for money and it sucks the life out of the whole process. Look no further than yours truly: imagine how awful I would be as a restaurant owner.

With that all in mind, I read this recently (via Dense Discovery), which talks about the idea of resonance with respect to any work. In short, there is internal resonance (how the person felt making the thing) and external resonance (how the audience felt experiencing the thing). Here, text focuses on both. Write more replies to me, and I’ll vibe with the external resonance and write more about what lights you up. But also, I have to like writing the thing. Sometimes I am writing mid-slog, needing to shed other things that fail to nourish me, and it shows up in text, because I am tired and resolving karma and slowly weighing myself down for probably no good reason.

I don’t examine the inner consequences of what I make enough. I definitely think about how you feel. That one bit about the plant sale from two years ago went viral. So did the sandwich essay. One becomes known for things, as long as the things are good and drop at the right time and reach the right people who are in the right mood that day. I feel more pressure to create some sort of legacy, an impact; text, towards that end, always feels like buying a few lottery tickets a week.

What about lottery tickets for myself, though? How am I feeling after making anything? I was hanging with a friend on Saturday who insisted I need to play more. Theoretically, text is a space for that play. How do I keep practicing the creation of spaciousness for that play, so I can feel the same sort of internal resonance that the aforelinked describes?