The Wall at the End of Every Subject
Fifteen hundred posts into this thing and I finally hit the wall. Not writer’s block—the compulsion to type was still there, reliable as a headache—but something closer to the creeping suspicion that I’d already said everything I had any right to say. Heartbreak, desire, the particular embarrassment of growing up in public, bands I was convinced would change everything: all of it catalogued, filed, and sent into the world.
What do you do with that? The obvious move is the NEON magazine approach—run the same twelve articles on heartbreak and career anxiety on a strict annual rotation, dress them up with new cover lines, call it journalism. Works fine if you’re a magazine. If you’re a person writing about your actual life, it’s just self-plagiarism with better formatting.
The other option is to dig through the archive, pull out whatever still holds up, and republish it with a fresh date. There’s something honest about that—an admission that a good thought doesn’t expire. But it also feels like defeat. Like you’ve used up whatever you had to offer and now you’re reduced to recycling your former self.
New bands, new faces, good work worth writing about: that stream never dries up. What runs thin is the essential material—the things that actually matter to a person navigating their twenties, their thirties, whatever year it is. Love, the feeling of time moving wrong, the specific texture of wanting something you can’t name. I’d covered all of it. Published, ticked off, filed.
What keeps pulling me back is the possibility that returning to the same subjects isn’t failure. That you circle back—to lovesickness, to ambition, to the sense of being slightly out of phase with your own life—because each time you arrive from a different position. Different damage, different clarity, different things you’ve given up on or started believing in. The spiral isn’t going nowhere. It just looks that way from inside it.
So you write it again. Badly or well, with something new to say or without. The wall doesn’t move. You just find new ways to run at it.