Want to Decolonize Your Writing?

The laptop is warm against my chest. October in Calgary, and I’ve got the window cracked because my anxiety needs air, even cooling into evening. My wooden desk—rough grain, two hundred small scratches from pens and coffee cups and the pressure of years, beside my Thunderbird necklace inherited from my grandfather beside it—holds everything I need right now. The laptop, a handwritten notebook (paper, because good thoughts refuse to live digitally), a mug of cooling decaf coffee, and my hands.

## Foam and the Wooden Desk: How Ideas Live in Systems and in Hands

My hands know the difference between this desk and the rest of the world. The texture of the wood grain. [They’ve typed 1,051,693 words across fourteen years.](https://blog.brennan.day/i-analyzed-14-years-of-my-writing-with-vibe-coding-d7d0b7d23fd4) My hands write careful ceremonies and Queer theory and the specific terror of 3 AM panic into existence. Knowing things my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.

The question is *how do I make those hands knowable to anyone else?* How do I take what lives in my body, in this desk, in this particular October light falling through my Calgary window, and transform into something worth sharing?

The answer lives in systems. Not the glamorous kind. The unglamorous, technical kind which most writers never talk about because it contradicts the romantic notion of inspiration.

People imagine ideas arriving fully formed. A bolt of inspiration. The muse descending. That’s not what happens.

750 words. Not every day—expectation sets traps. But consistently. Over fourteen years. Since I was fifteen years old, I started writing on [750words.com](https://750words.com/), and though I’ve cycled through periods of daily devotion and months of abandonment, I’ve landed on a sustainable rhythm that doesn’t punish me for missing days. The practice is simple: open the file, set a loose intention, and write until something true arrives. No editing. No self-consciousness. No deleting. If I run out of things to say, I write “I don’t know what to write” until *something* emerges.

The files accumulate. Over 1,051,693 words since 2011. Maybe an intimidating amount of raw material, but only 10% of those words are ever meant for publication. The rest is processing. Thinking out loud. The internal monologue typed frantically at midnight.

Journals are laboratories of consciousness. Places where I experiment with voice, work through ideas, document the daily texture of existence that forms the bedrock of meaningful writing.

But that 10%? That’s where the literary journalism comes from.

Ideas arrive as fragments. Incomplete. Often contradictory. My anxiety manifests in my hands as tremor. I think of Indigenous healing systems rejecting mind/body dualism. Indigenous epistemologies, par