Anna Gát has this lovely essay on not disappearing - on staying the course, keeping at it, being in the small minority of people whose efforts do not fizzle.
I agree this is hugely valuable. I ran a literary review for a while, many years ago, and observed the same trend she describes. Once the little fire of readership was kindled (and it was never very large), the vital thing was never to stop, never to take a break for just a few weeks, never to fall behind on the slush pile. It’s like running a tabletop roleplaying campaign. If you skip one session, you’re in danger. If you skip two, the campaign is certainly over.
But what about when you do disappear, in some arena or other, and then choose to return? It’s a different thing from appearing in the first place, starting fresh, and it’s harder. I’ve been trying to reappear in a few ways lately.
First: this blog. I used to be much more active on social media than I am now, and now most of my accounts have accreted plenty of cobwebs. My dusty old Facebook got a good showing when I shared a post here there, and I was happy to see some old friends cheering me on. But on Twitter I got zero engagement - the people who followed me the many years ago I made the account are mostly gone, or their interests have drifted different places than mine. If this was my first foray into writing in public - if I’d never written essays on Tumblr, say - then there would be no baseline with which to compare that zero. But having done this before, it’s harder.
Second: math. I studied it in college, along with philosophy. But philosophy classes were a lot easier, so philosophy was the degree I got. I found abstract algebra particularly fascinating, but dropped the course when I got a 0 on a test. So I’ve been going through the textbook again, asking Claude or GPT-4 for help when I get stuck (they often are wrong but are still helpful interlocutors). Just a few minutes each day, but with great consistency. Eventually, I’ll get through the book, and then I’ll know abstract algebra. But it was hard to get started, hard to move past the prologue of my prior engagements with the subject, and the emotional entanglement of having failed.
Reappearing is harder than appearing in the first place. It doesn’t have the same manic energy. And there is a baseline - the last time you appeared - to compare to, which is likely to be unwelcome. But there’s something lovely about it, too. I am further along in my abstract algebra textbook than I have ever been before. Maybe someday this blog’s readership will exceed the (never too large) readership of my Tumblr essay heyday. It’s hard to say.
I think Anna is right that it’s good sometimes, maybe even better, to disappear. Indeed, it’s well worth disappearing from arenas that no longer serve you, to retreat into the parts of your life that feel most worth living. But not to reappear when you secretly want to, to shrink away, to make the incidental fact of having disappeared part of your identity, to cosplay as Cincinnatus to justify mere timidity… that cannot be the way.