Apophany is a monthly column by Christopher Sloce. It is about how the suprising connections from one cultural artifact to another, and how these speculations may give us a better understanding of the world. You can continue to support our work and others by subscribing to Kittysneezes Patreon. 

Time flies fastest when you need a few more minutes on the clock. I had also pretty much settled what April would be about the minute I decided to write my critique of how commentary YouTube operates. So I missed the birthday of Apophany and an opportunity to reflect on the year of writing. 

Apophany had a functional function, for starters. I hate to be crass, but: I realized the best thing for my writing “career” was a steady amount of work coming out. Thus, speaking with Matt Keeley, we settled on two columns a month, which worked at the time. My idea was to never have more than a four day turnaround. After all, I was writing a 1250 to 1500 word column, so on the week before I could just lay it down then fix it up in a day, make the header image, boom. 

Obviously that didn’t work out and I think it’s for the best. There were a lot of failed columns that would have fallen out of date within two weeks. Creative people have a gun to their head telling them they must always be relevant, but part of that relevance is having something to say. I don’t have much to say about Clavicular than “Damn, it’s crazy he did that with a hammer.” There is also a psychic cost to Having to Have a Take. People may believe that by playing the game they are playing algorithms, but when you comment on something to comment on it, it’s pretty obvious who holds all the cards. Part of the trap to avoid is becoming a “content creator”. I’m a writer and don’t want to waste my time on persiflage for a few extra clicks. Numbers actually don’t matter to me as much as impact on specific people, because the dirty secret of building even something of a writing career is I actually am not that popular if you look at “metrics”. The flip side is the people who get what I’m doing or find it interesting are people who run websites, write good criticism themselves, or are good readers. Those are people who actually share things or point you to another venue or, you know, read you. 

But what are we really reading here is a good question? 

I’ll do a round of self-crit here, an often misunderstood topic that is usually misunderstood wilfully. Criticism isn’t just “You’re fucking up”, it’s determining what you’re fucking up at in the first place and how you got there. I’ve done my best to put some materialist undergirding to my essays, something I think is missing from a lot of commentary. That’s why I talk producers, who pays for what, who boosts something. The problem with developing rhetorically more quickly than you do intellectually is you rely on rhetoric to do the trick. The hope is to grow and get smarter. I’m not sure what I got wrong, when I really think about it, but somewhere, I was. The passions I do have don’t always act as the richest pool of understanding the whole world of culture. My abiding obsessions felt as if they could sustain engaging with the world, but after a year of writing these columns, I would say: not so fast, pal. 

But all self-criticism is nothing without acknowledging what I have not acknowledged throughout a year or so. Writing requires time and stability. Since August, I have spent time being underemployed or unemployed. This is a shame that has paralyzed me in more ways than one. The structure of a full time job led to me writing more, not less. The pressure of finding full-time work has dampened my creativity, not helped it. The various temp jobs have not lead to more orderly writing. They have led to struggle. All of this comes back to the shame of losing my job in the first place. I have wondered if I will ever recover, ever. The jury remains out. 

That pressure has affected my art in its own way too. Where once, the process was the process and as long as I figured it out, it was acceptable to step away. Now every piece has to show some path forward, show my improvement, show I’m worth something. Under employment, I wanted to stretch my prose writing and thinking to unseen places. Now: I want to eat. I have to prioritize what pays and what I can do with that time. It’s a minor version of the crunch a lot of people feel in hard times. A lot of writers elide these economic questions; I refuse. Freedom of speech is not freedom from money, and the less money you have the less I think you can speak freely. My employer may have a harder time firing me for my opinions, but no such rule exists for being hired unless that’s the reason cited. 

This is why, multiple times over the past year, I’ve genuinely thought about hanging it all up. Twenty years of serious writing and calling it. Even before I lost my job, I began to think I wasn’t enough. I grew overly critical and concerned a writer who I think is just fine would hate my work. This all happened not long after I was sexually harassed in a particularly demeaning way at my day job. A word on surviving: not many straight men, it feels, are open about the fact that women can also be predatory. The person who tried to groom me and put me in positions no child should be in, who commented on my body in front of my stepmother, too drunk or doped up to say anything despite her own history, was not a creepy man. It was a woman who died not long after. I rejoiced, but it turns out even in that rejoicing I didn’t know that she had taken something from me, that in the coming years of college I’d wonder why I was so scared of physical contact, of being considered attractive, not knowing I learned the hardest lesson to learn: you have to fight for your body to be your own. In the course of that fight, I have come to realize my most precious ally I had is my voice: how the history I have engulfed and my own personal history, how everything I’ve heard and everything I’ve said, all my thoughts good and bad, how they become a record of existence and the one gift I have to give. There is no stopping because there is no me without writing. I have felt I lost my north star, confused by floaters in my eyes they beat into me. This is wrong. The north star blinks on my word document as I make my way home. There is no stopping.