Stammering Through
2025-09-20
Today has been a good day so far. I've spent it mostly just responding to messages and also finishing up the outline for an IOKTIKN essay. I haven't done one in several months at this point and it's crazy to me how much time went by. My last essay was one that I was proud of because I felt like I was able to say a lot of good and important stuff in a way that I felt was strongly communicated. My workflow for Cogito is always a stream-of-consciousness one; I write what's on my mind at the moment, in the moment, and publish it as is with little to no revision. IOKTIKN's workflow is a bit more involved because I want my ideas to be more thorough in concept and execution, so I always try to write outlines and make sure that those are sufficiently structured before proceeding with the actual writing. In the past, I've also been less inclined to do sprints for those pieces, but I think I want to try it for them because I want to try and get out as much as I can in a short amount of time. I don't want to agonize over figuring out just the right way to put something—like I've mentioned before, I want the least amount of friction between my thoughts and my fingers as possible.
I've considered dictation in the past and have recommended it to others who don't like typing because they're not that fast or not the best spellers, but for me dictation is not the best strategy because I feel that I don't speak in the same way that I write. It's weird for me because I feel like I write much better than I speak. When I speak, I constantly stammer and stutter. I speak really slowly. But when I write, I feel just so much more efficient in my communication. I know just what I want to say and how to say it and I don't have to worry about the flow of ideas coming out of my mouth. For some reason, writing is just more efficient for me.
I don't have any anxiety about speaking, though. I can converse with people just fine and public speaking isn't that big of a deal for me as long as I can plan out my speech beforehand. But yeah, I'm also struggling to come up with stuff to write about here. I remember back when I was in high school, I had a teacher who used to call out students who said filler words such as "um" and "like" when answering a question or generally just speaking. I found it hard to not use those words and so I built up this habit of slowing down my speech so that I wouldn't say those filler words, but it was hard and now I feel like I just talk slowly without any real improvement. I don't like how slowly I speak, but I don't really know how I would train myself to speak faster—not like I'd want to anyway.
Yeah, I'm struggling to come up with any good stuff to write about here and I hate that, but I don't want to give up on writing. I want to see through it like I would a long-distance run or something. I want to push through the block and find myself on the other side of it. Even if it's not a glorious "aha!" type moment every time I write, it doesn't matter because I have to let myself just push through and keep finding something to say so that when I do have more inspiration, I can put it to good use. I don't want to stop writing just because I feel tired or blocked in some kind of way. I want to feel the flow of my words as I say them in my mind and put them through the keyboard. I want to keep going. I have to.