Today marks the first Sunday Reflection newsletter for Thoughtless Opinions. Thank you to those seeing this in your inbox.
Getting ready to write, knowing that someone might read it, is a moment filled with multiple emotions. Excitement about what words are going to flow onto the blank screen, anxiety about making mistakes or sounding foolish, imposter syndrome wondering why anyone would want to read what I’m putting onto a page.
Today, I’m writing this from a recliner in the living room, my ten-month-old, sitting on my lap, doing everything in her power to make editing this a more difficult experience. So if this newsletter is seemingly missing an entire paragraph, it was probably the foot of an infant. However, if it’s missing proper grammar or has spelling mistakes, I’ll have to take the blame for that one. I am quite a terrible editor of my own work.
This Week was about Connection
Earlier this week I posted about being comfortable as a Surface Dweller and it featured a part about the power of connections. I made an apparently unconscious effort, driven by, I think, the decision to start this newsletter, to spend more time connecting with others. Whether that was making new friends on Twitter or being more engaged with my family without the distraction of a smartphone.
Yesterday we took a hike up Rattlesnake Point in Ontario, Canada. It was a much-needed getaway from the office/daycare/restaurant that our home has become.
Making connections always feels a little superficial in the beginning. Unless you are in elementary school, they seemingly always start with some form of transaction. You need something, so you reach out to someone who can get you what you need. Many times, the interaction ends there, but every once in awhile you are lucky enough to find common ground and grow a relationship.
Making connections is not linear, it’s exponential.
I had been feeling really disconnected these past few months. With everything that is going on in the world my brain was staying busy, information was flowing in and out, but I wasn’t connected. I wasn’t connected to my emotions or to other people. There is so much information, so many emotions being whipped around at all times, that my brain was getting swamped trying to keep up with it all.
So I did something that I haven’t done in a few months. I stopped paying attention to politics, turned off the news, and focused heavily on the people and areas I get joy from. For me, that was marketing and game dev twitter as well as a huge portion to being with my family.
Until I did this, I hadn’t realized how disconnected I was from what was going on in my own home. I played with my kids, I did my chores, but I wasn’t there as much as I wanted to be. A part of my brain was focused on the latest thing Trump did or the COVID death toll. It’s not that all the information wasn’t important or interesting, it’s just that it wasn’t helping me be a better husband or father.
Once I started focusing on other people, I realized that making connections isn’t linear, it’s exponential. The more I connected, the more connections found me. The more time I spent focused on playing with my kids, the more games and activities we did and the less time we spent on screens. And the more I talked with my partner, the more I remembered just how lucky I was to have her in my life.
Now that I’m reflecting on the week, I realize how much more involved I was with other people and how much more enjoyable it was. I mentioned in my earlier article that social interaction takes a lot out of me and that is still true. I was exhausted this week, but I felt more fulfilled than I have in a long time.
What to Expect From Thoughtless Opinions
I wanted to a little time on this first reflection to set expectations of what you can expect from reading my newsletter and that brings us to the title of this week’s reflection: Authenticity, Transparency, and Fear. I’m going to explore what these words mean to me and how they will influence my writing.
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Authenticity
I’m hoping to share lots of my opinions without adding too much of a filter in an attempt to gain followers or appeal to everyone. This newsletter will not be for everyone; it might really be for no one, but we’ll get to fear later. What I write will, to the best of my abilities, come from a place of truth, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be fully transparent.
Transparency
I consider myself a decent writer and a growing storyteller. This newsletter will include lots of transparency on marketing strategy, games I’m playing, and things I’m learning, but there will be specific facts that may be withheld for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons may include protecting people’s identity or avoiding breaking any non-disclosure agreements.
Whenever things are being changed for any reason, I will make sure to point that out, because, though I might not always be 100% transparent, I will be authentic.
Fear
Being authentic and transparent is terrifying. People are going to react differently to what gets said. Though this newsletter isn’t going to be the most controversial or ground-breaking set of literary notes, it does mean something to me. I’m going to be putting myself out there and that’s terrifying. Fear is an emotion that we take for granted in people who we view as less successful than us. Only when someone has risen to a rank we consider superior to us, do we gain empathy for the fear they had on their journey; because they survived. They beat the odds and that’s inspirational. I’ll be sharing a lot of my fears and anxiety on this journey because it would be inauthentic to do otherwise.
Dreams
Although dreams didn’t make the headline, I have been reflecting on my dreams a lot since I made the decision to start this newsletter. For years, I’ve had a dream of being a successful writer. Having people read what I write but even more, look forward to what I publish. And of course, make money while doing it.
I’ve had brief forays into writing, some that even made a couple of thousand dollars on Medium, but I’ve always been inconsistent. Life, work that pays the bills, fear of failure always ended up derailing the one thing that it really takes to be successful at anything; consistent steps towards improvement.
Because making some money part of the dream, I’m going to ask today, and likely ask many more times in the future, that if you like what I’m doing, consider supporting this newsletter with a monthly or yearly subscription. With a subscription, you’ll get access to experimental content as it comes out. Some planned experimental content is:
A monthly cartoon series
A Quarterly Printed Magazine
Fiction Friday short stories
The Thoughtless Opinions Podcast
The Word List - A Curated list of meanings of words I come across and don’t understand.
Have a great week and we’ll chat soon.