Boredom is a Portal

Hello, Happy September!

It’s so nice to be back in your inbox.

Today marks my return to the internet and the end of my second annual August Offline. I realized this morning that I can now officially call this a yearly tradition because, I think, you really only need to do something two years in a row for it to qualify, right?

August Offline is sort of a personal retreat for me. A month of not knowing, in the external sense; a month of remembering, in the internal sense. It’s been a welcome return to what I’ve been calling my attention sovereignty — or choosing what gets my attention, and when it gets it.

Life online, particularly on social media, seems to slowly carve away at my attention. It’s not all bad, certainly. I enjoy many online spaces. But in the attention-economy, it’s easy to lose control of where our attention goes.

So I spent the month doing a lot of little projects. I painted a mural on my porch, built a garden fence, watched the American Goldfinches snack on the sunflowers, pulled lots of weeds, ate lots of cucumbers, learned to make animations, rebuilt my website, and planned some fun upcoming projects. AND I read The Odyssey.

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I also found myself feeling bored (surprisingly The Odyssey played no part in that).

Normally, I would fill the boredom-gap by reaching for my phone and scrolling. Instead, I tried to just let myself feel it.

Boredom is a funny thing. Culturally, we’re taught to think of boredom as a negative state of being — something to fix, or even a character flaw. Lately, I’ve been trying to think of boredom more like a portal or a threshold; leaning into it rather than reaching for the nearest distraction.

It’s a little uncomfortable, if I’m being honest (no wonder we reach for distractions!). Anxiety, stress, and hard emotions tend to linger there. But I’ve also found a deeper well of creative drive the more I let myself move through the boredom.

It’s hard to translate this metaphor, but letting myself feel bored in order to excavate creative energy feels a little like eating my vegetables before diving into a plate of cake. Somehow, the boredom nourishes me. It makes room for the creative energy to ease its way to the surface, and, if I'm sticking with the metaphor, makes the creative energy a little more “digestible”. 

Thank you for giving me a soft place to land as I return to the interweb. I hope you'll go peek at the NEW WEBSITE. I'll be adding more updates this fall as more projects come together.