It would be nice to compulsively write anymore; but I guess over time even our most primary instincts eventually get weighed down with pessimism and contextual baggage, making them too heavy and toxic to be primary anymore. In 2010 I wrote all the time and furiously, because I had spent so long thinking nobody heard me, and even the twinkling of a promise that somebody did was enough to wake me up every morning. In 2011 I knew people heard me, and writing became more about career than about catharsis. I think that’s a good development; I’d be more worried if I still approached my keyboard hyperventilating with narcissistic panic every time I sat down to type. Clearing the fog of emotion out of the mix helps a lot of other more lasting ideas come through, the kind you hope they will pay you money for someday. This year they did, which was one of the most validating developments of my adult life, and something I’m extremely grateful for.

But without that fog, that selective blindness, sometimes you never make it to the keyboard to begin with. And that brings me back to the idea of compulsion: I compulsively synthesize almost everything that passes through my awareness into patterns and theories, mostly bullshit but a few valid strings here and there. That act alone is not something I have to force myself to do, even at my most deflated. Writing it all down, however, has become more fraught with doubt and apathy. I find myself seriously considering, over and over again, why I care enough to spend my time telling people about any of these notions. Because I do care – even with the stupidest reality show or vapid pop anthem, if I have something to say about it it’s because there is some core thread in it that ties back to a larger condition, something universal, something I’m convinced not everyone’s aware of and needs to be, desperately. I want to talk about Nicole Scherzinger and awful depressing game shows on ABC because their existence is indicative of something I’ve only just begun to get my fingers around, and we all know we talk the most about the things we know least enough, but hopefully the things we are working the hardest at understanding.

And that’s where that fog is useful; it is more exciting to have a new idea than to think to yourself “breakfast is good,” or “breakups suck,” because of the dangerous, delightful uncertainty of whether the former is even true. I know the subjects of the goodness of breakfast and the suckiness of breakups all too well, I could write a book about each but would fall asleep before I finished the first paragraph. But this new idea… it could be nothing, but it feels like something right now, and it needs to be buoyed and protected in order to survive the inevitable onslaught of self-edits, fast-tracked to the screen in a huff of burning-heart-belief in one’s own convictions. It needs to remain partially mysterious to me until the publish button is pressed; if I debunk it at any point prior to that I take the wind out of its sails, so the bullshit dies as well as the two or three valid points. If you can summon that kind of topical (apply directly to affected area) emotion so that professional writing feels as cathartic as posting hotpix, you’ve nearly beaten the game.

My compulsion to write has been overtaken by my compulsion to be right, my compulsion to edit, my petrification (fear, stone, silence) of appearing stupid. It’s no use knowing that half of your ideas are better than 90% of what’s out there when you intentionally sabotage your train of thought before it reaches your fingertips. The brutal joke of it all is that that kind of private, extremely common, inflated sense of conviction is entirely theoretical and can only exist before you go out and (try to) prove it; it’s much comfier to know that you could be the best at what you do if only you tried, then to try and find out you’re only fourth or fifth best.

That’s why I wonder about compulsion, which, like everyone else on earth, I have too much of for the things that are bad for me and not enough for the things my “higher mind” wants to do. I put quotes around “higher mind” because more and more I’m extremely suspicious of such distinctions, but the fact remains that some things are automatic and some things are… not. The funny thing is that compulsion, to me at least, seems more likely to be the foundation of a hobby than a career; something that you do because you want to and it’s fun. I think of that band of moms in Young Adult, they wanted to start a rock band because it would be an amusing way to spend their time, not because they hoped to get a record deal. There’s no angst in a hobby, no struggle, no yawning gap between where you are and where you think you ought to be. You can’t help it, which is a completely separate phenomenon from skill or technique or artistry. But perhaps because it is a phenomenon rather than something with a clear cause-and-effect relationship it carries an aura of specialness. There is so much more mystery in attraction than in ambition. There is so much more romance in passion than in tedious hard work.

I spend hours wondering whether or not a particular idea I’m about to write about is worth my or anyone else’s time, while wondering on top of that if something I have to wonder so much about is something I should even do in the first place. But maybe it’s time to stop placing so much value in the effortless, in the compulsive. Maybe difficulty isn’t a sign that you’re just not cut out for a certain line of work, on the contrary, maybe what we really need to be concerned with is the stuff that pours out of us like water. Most other things that come up that easily we just flush down the toilet, why do we treat the words that do with so much more respect? I’m not saying that everything that’s easy to make has the intellectual value of vomit, but I don’t think it’s necessarily more pure or important than anything else. The problem is that it’s sort of hard to tear your eyes away from that puking person in the corner, it’s a bizarre and relatively uncommon human activity to witness, while the person who holds their liquor gets through the party both unscathed and unremembered.

So here’s all I ask of 2012: Most of us will continue to fritter away in relative anonymity all our lives, few of us will be as famous and we refuse to admit we want to be, there will usually be an inverse relationship between hard work and public acclaim. But maybe we can uncover, or rediscover, a little bit of romance in whatever sisyphean act we’ve so lovingly let consume our lives. Maybe we can recognize that romance in others’ work, even when it isn’t outwardly provocative or shocking, find the glamor in the pursuit of the unglamorous. And maybe when we start to respect our compulsion to do things that don’t come easily, the things we do do will be ever brighter, tougher, weirder, and cooler.