What got the 🪓 in my "September Purge"

Free up the time and space to create something meaningful... and may your "September Purge" feel as good as mine.

Thanks for letting me take a week of vacation— there was some detoxing to be done, as paid subscribers will read about below. 🫶 I wrote the below for you in Portugal over the last few weeks— hence the vinho verde…

I often find myself suddenly on the cusp of a great idea or an urge to scribble down a thought for a Substack letter or one of the two fiction drafts I abashedly talk about making progress on but never sit down to write— instead I continue about my day or my hour on the set track that I “should” be on. I should just finish this book I’m reading, I’m almost done. I should fold the laundry and tidy the kitchen so we can start that movie we picked out for the evening. I should brush the sand off my feet and drag my sun-soaked body to the shower to freshen up.

When I have these fleeting thoughts, I never actually do make it back to the notebook or the Google Doc when I have finished that house-clean, that chapter of the book or that shower. The thoughts are lost— every single time.

When I have a good idea or a whiff of inspiration, it’s like a dream: sharp, crystal clear, it feels as though there will never be a moment that I will lose the clarity of the memory of it. But in just a few minutes, much less hours, it’s always completely gone— having slipped through my fingers as the monotony and dullness of every day adult life prevails, or worse, sucked into the loud buzz of NOISE in my inbox, my texts, my notifications, and the attention I feebly hand over to social media and other people’s creation.

Ah. But what if there was less noise?

I absorb so much that I don’t care about, so much loud internet babble that there is actually not enough space to: 1.) be bored or still enough to create anything of meaningful consequence as a writer or creative and 2.) actually be content with the present moment as opposed to getting lost in a storm of “shoulds.”

Your mind and body give you niggling signals about what kinds of noise feels good— or doesn’t.

So what if this September we settled into the fall and the busy months ahead by releasing what doesn’t?