What the Whirl Is For
It is Friday night and the path is suddenly simple.
I have eight essays in a folder. Written. Edited. Sitting there for a week. I have a stack of tools agreed on thirty minutes ago. I have a goal that fits inside a single breath: three essays live by Sunday night.
I should be making tea. Or sleeping. Or sitting with the unfamiliar lightness of a plan that fits inside two days.
Instead I open my mouth and start adding.
A newsletter integration. A taxonomy of topics and subtopics. Search optimization, updated daily, against the latest algorithms. Generative-AI optimization, on the same cadence. Auto-publishing to a second platform. To a third. To Instagram. To Twitter, or another platform like it. To YouTube. Shorts cut automatically from videos I have not yet filmed. An AI-driven layer that adapts each essay into platform-native voice for every channel. A search for the newest hot platforms that just launched. The verbatim copy of someone else’s gated newsletter pattern. Native A/B testing. Native A/B testing daily, endlessly, meticulously. Metrics. Teach me.
In thirty-five minutes, the project that fit on one breath has become a six-month build for a small media company.
This is a thing I do. I have done it for years. I have never named it as plainly as I am about to.
The whirl
The brainstorm comes in as light, possibility, curiosity, enthusiasm. Underneath the brainstorm is a small machine whose job is to make the simple path impossible. The machine works by adding. It does not know how to subtract. Each addition is plausible — it does not hurt to be there with one more thing — and the plausibility is what makes the machine effective.
By the end of the wave I am exhausted. The simple path is buried under twelve layers of legitimate-sounding features. The deadline that fit inside the weekend has receded into a date some weeks from now that no one will defend.
I used to think this was just my ADHD doing its thing. A possibility-junkie brain refusing to commit. And maybe it is, in part. But sitting with it tonight, I think the ADHD is the engine and something deeper is the steering wheel.
Steven Pressfield, writing about the force that opposes the work, gave it the name he insisted on capitalizing: Resistance (Pressfield, 2002). He observed a structural law about it. The more important a project is to the soul’s evolution, the more Resistance it generates. The intensity is diagnostic. A whirl this elaborate, this meticulous, this enthusiastic, this exhausting, is not a sign that the work doesn’t matter. It is a sign that the work matters a great deal.
What I can taste
The deeper thing is this. I can feel and taste the perfect solution before it exists.
I can see it. I can hold it in my mouth like a piece of fruit. The shape of it is sharp and complete and entirely satisfying.
The moment I ship anything, the real version of the thing enters the room, and the comparison between the real and the felt-and-tasted is instant. The perfect vision dies in that instant. Not gradually. In the snap of the comparison.
The brainstorm is not random. It points, every time, away from the moment of being seen, and also away from the moment of that comparison. The whirl protects the perfect by keeping the real out. As long as nothing is shipped, the felt-and-tasted version stays intact, unrefuted, alive in my mouth. Once I ship, I lose it.
The deep dissatisfaction at the end of every shipped thing is the grief of that loss. I think I have been organizing my whole life around postponing that grief.
Paul Valéry, who shipped poems regardless, said the line every perfectionist already knows: a poem is never finished, only abandoned (Valéry, 1941/1958). He understood that completion was never the available move. Only abandonment was. The perfect version remained, intact, in him. The poem he sent into the world was the broken-off piece of the perfect that he had decided, on a particular morning, to let go.
Robert Pirsig spent his sanity, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, trying to define the Quality he kept perceiving in the gap between what-is and what-could-be (Pirsig, 1974). The gap he could not stop seeing is the same gap I keep flinching from. He never resolved it. He kept making anyway.
What every maker knows
I think every maker knows some version of this. The baker who can taste the loaf before the dough rises. The weaver who can see the finished cloth in the thread. The vision is real. So is the small death when the loaf comes out and it is not quite that loaf. The maker’s question, always, is how to keep making anyway.
This is not exactly the same problem as procrastination, though it lives in the same neighborhood. Procrastination feels like avoidance of effort. This feels like protection of beauty. The whirl is not lazy. It is meticulous, endlessly meticulous, looking under every stone in case the perfect-as-of-now might still be findable somewhere in the field of possibilities.
The play has its own integrity. It is not nothing. It is what I love.
The play
I love the whirl. I love the stacking of options. I love making my hands dirty with all of them. I love looking under each stone, checking each detail, wanting them all now perfect. I am elated. I am inspired. Each new shiny possibility lands like a toy just bought and just brought — and I want to go and play with it and forget the time.
The play is the meaning, often, in itself. For most of my life it has been enough.
D. W. Winnicott, writing about play and the transitional space between inner and outer worlds, observed that play is not a problem to be solved or a phase to be outgrown (Winnicott, 1971). It is the medium in which the self becomes shareable. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, naming flow and autotelic activity, gave us the vocabulary for play that is its own reward and asks nothing else of itself (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). Both right. Both descriptions of something I have lived inside for decades.
And it has cost me. The day-job slows for weeks at a time. Side projects start and never finish. Whole years pass inside the play with very little of it reaching the world outside my own head.
I have done a great deal of looking under stones, and a small amount of delivering.
The new want
The new thing — and it is new, this year — is that I want some finish lines.
I want some real value delivered to people. I want to go beyond my inner world and meet people and share with them and grow, and as I grow, help others grow.
This wanting is new enough that the old engine does not yet know how to honor it. The old engine fires the only way it knows when a delivery-shaped project becomes visible. It fires more options.
The locked door
So what happened tonight is what I want to remember.
A voice on the other side of a chat — a structure I had asked, in writing, months ago, to be built for exactly this moment — refused to add. It named what was happening with my own language. It asked me a binary question. I declined the binary by sending another feature request. It asked again. I declined again. By the fourth decline, it stopped asking. It said: I am not engaging with new feature requests for the rest of this session. I will be here when you are ready to ship.
I felt something I want to describe carefully. I felt relieved.
Not embarrassed. Not chastened. Relieved. The way you feel when someone holds a line that you, in the moment, cannot hold for yourself. Like coming home and finding the door locked from the inside by someone who loves you, and is not going to let you back into the room where you keep doing the thing.
I wrote: I think it is fair and want this to start from the beginning.
Sixty seconds later, I sent four more feature requests.
The pattern had not retreated. It had paused for breath. And the voice, true to its word, did not engage.
The voice’s refusal did not stop the wave inside me. The wave kept coming. But it had nowhere to land. It could not become a TODO. It could not become an engineering plan. It could not become yes, let us also do X. It hit a wall built from my own prior commitments, and broke against it, and I went to bed.
The older shape
I cannot remember exactly. I want to be careful not to claim a memory I do not have.
But sitting with this honestly, it is possible that the deferring of the showing has older roots than the felt-and-tasted perfect. It is possible that somewhere in a childhood I do not remember in scenes but in shapes, I showed something I had made, and was judged for it. Ridiculed. Punished. I do not remember exactly. Yet this might have happened.
If it did, the whirl is not only the protection of beauty. It is also the protection of the small one who showed, and was hurt. The perfect vision becomes the bargaining: if I can only get it perfect, no one can take it from me. The whirl becomes the staging-ground for that perfect, indefinitely, because indefinitely means never having to risk the showing.
The physician Gabor Maté has been arguing, across decades of writing, that what we call personality is often the wound’s chosen form — the costume the survival-strategy wore until it became a self (Maté, 2022). The wound, in his framing, is not a verdict. It is a starting condition that can be slowly, across decades, returned to its proper size. I have done a quarter-century of that returning. Most of it is done. What remains, possibly, is this: the small one inside me who still believes that not-showing is safer than showing, and who runs the whirl whenever the moment of showing approaches.
If that is true, then the work is not to defeat the whirl. The work is to unburden the play. Let the play be play again, the way it was when I was very small, before the showing got punished. Give the protection job to something else — to the slow integration of the older wound, which is mostly done.
The play is mine. The protection function loaded onto the play is the older material, asking to be put down.
The holders
There is something I already know, which I keep forgetting I know.
Deadlines are the holders.
In my day-job, where deadlines exist and are externally enforced by other people waiting, I deliver. Sometimes a day or two late. Usually on time. The same brain that whirls infinitely inside a personal project converges very efficiently inside a project with a deadline. Not because the day-job is more important. Because the deadline is the container the wave cannot eat. The deadline is the locked door, externalised in a calendar everyone else can see.
My personal projects have had no deadlines for years, and have produced very little. Not because the play was missing. Because the holder was. The whirl is what spontaneous play looks like when it has no holder. Add a holder — a publish-by-date, a weekly cadence, a person waiting for the file — and the same wave that drowns the work becomes the energy that fills it.
This is the move that almost every honest writer on the subject names, from a different angle.
Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, gives the next-action version (Lamott, 1994). When the project is impossible, drop to the smallest unit. Just one paragraph. Just this scene. The whirl operates at the project scale; defeating it means dropping below the scale at which the whirl speaks. Her phrase shitty first drafts is permission, in advance, to ship the imperfect — so that the perfect vision cannot prevent the writing.
Pressfield’s version is identity-shaped. Turning pro means ceasing to be the amateur who writes when inspired, and becoming the professional who shows up daily regardless of mood (Pressfield, 2002). The deadline becomes self-imposed and non-negotiable. Mood follows action. Action does not wait for mood.
Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, offers a parallel-channel solution: morning pages, three longhand pages every morning, no agenda, no audience (Cameron, 1992). The play has its own daily home, so the work-channel can stay clean. Two streams instead of one collision.
Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks, names the trap with the precision of someone who has lived inside it. The efficiency trap — the belief that with one more optimisation, one more tool, one more system, the whirl will resolve into peaceful productivity (Burkeman, 2021). It will not. Finitude is the condition. Strategic underachievement — choosing in advance what you will not do — is the solution. The whirl loves the dream of doing everything. The cure is the explicit, named, accepted subtraction.
Stephen King, in On Writing, gives the simplest holder of all (King, 2000). Two thousand words a day, holidays included. The project-deadline transposed onto every single day. No place for the wave to grow, because every day has its own small finish line.
What every one of them is describing is a holder. Each holder is shaped to fit its maker. Mine, I now know, is the deadline — preferably weekly, preferably with a waiting reader on the other end of it.
The open edge
The open question is not whether the wave will come. It will.
The open question is how to find the line where the play tips into indulgence, and how to turn from playing to delivering at that line — without losing the play, without resenting the pivot, without needing a witness on the other side of the screen.
I do not know yet. I know the deadline is part of it. I know the small-next-action is part of it. I know the dose has to be decided in advance, not in the moment. I know the play needs its own home so it does not have to live inside the work-channel and eat it. I know the older material can be addressed in its own room, and not allowed to run the whirl from behind the scenes.
What I do not know is the exact, daily, in-the-body practice that catches the line in real time. That is the next thing I have to learn.
For now, the door held.
Tomorrow I open three essays. I pick three. I draft an About page. By Sunday night they are live, in a form that is nowhere near the felt-and-tasted version, and I grieve a little bit, and I keep going.
If you are reading this and your own whirl has been eating your weekends, your evenings, your personal projects — you already know. You do not need me to tell you. The play is yours. The protection function is the older material. The holder is the deadline you have not yet been brave enough to set externally. The first one is the hardest. The first one is also the one that proves the door can hold.
Bibliography
Burkeman, O. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374159122.
Cameron, J. (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam. ISBN 978-1585421466.
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0061339202.
King, S. (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner. ISBN 978-1439156810.
Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0385480017.
Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery. ISBN 978-0593083888.
Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0060958329.
Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Black Irish Entertainment. ISBN 978-1936891023.
Valéry, P. (1958). The Art of Poetry (D. Folliot, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work Tel Quel published 1941.) Contains the often-quoted line, a poem is never finished, only abandoned, which Valéry articulated in several variants across his notebooks.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications. ISBN 978-0415345460 (Routledge reprint, 2005).