Notes on Interior Translation

This week I decided to stop pretending I know what I’m doing and just wrote whatever thoughts fell out of my head about learning to write. I feel like someone scribbling crayon drawings, which is both humbling and terrifying.

I started writing about “my journey of learning” because that seemed like something worth writing about. But then I realised something that made me want to delete everything: the best writing isn’t about topics at all. It’s about the person thinking through the topic in real-time, in a way that lets you watch their brain work.

Which means I’ve been approaching this completely backwards.

The designer’s curse

When I started writing, I treated it like design work. Design is problem-solving where you create with a specific audience and objective in mind. You identify the intention and hone in on the audience. You use empathy to understand their pain points and craft something useful and aesthetically pleasing.

Design has constraints that make perfectionism useful. You know what problem you’re solving, who you’re solving it for, what success looks like. Did they use it, or not? Did you convert them, or not? If someone’s yoga studio needs a logo, you don’t give them something that would work for a law firm. There are right and wrong answers, or at least better and worse ones.

Writing feels different. More open. Which should be liberating but instead feels terrifying because I identify too strongly with my writing. Outside of trying to sell something, writers might write simply because they have something to say. They inherently express themselves.

When I write as “I,” every sentence becomes a statement about who I am, what I think, how smart I am, whether I have anything worth saying. In design, if a logo doesn’t work, the logo doesn’t work. You can separate yourself from the design. In writing, if an essay doesn’t work, I start wondering if I’m not working.

This turns every draft into an existential crisis. Am I repeating myself? Are these ideas too obvious? Too cheesy? Too self-indulgent? Should I have more research? Should I cite sources? Am I allowed to just… think out loud like this?

The interior translation problem When you read something that stops you mid-scroll, you’re not responding to information. You’re responding to someone successfully translating their interior experience into words that recreate a similar experience in your head.

I’m terrible at this translation. Not because I don’t have interesting interior experiences, but because I can’t seem to capture them accurately. It’s like trying to describe the taste of water. You know what it is when you’re experiencing it, but the moment you try to put it into words, it becomes something else entirely.

Most writing operates on the surface level: here are some facts, here are some conclusions, here’s what you should think. But the writing that changes how you see the world gives you access to someone else’s internal weather system.

This might be what’s missing from my writing. Instead of trying to write about things, it’s better to write from the place where those things first took shape in my head. The problem is that most of us are terrible translators of our own experience. We think a feeling is “indescribable” when really we just haven’t learned the language yet.

The meta-loop

I got trapped in this loop: I wanted to write something worth reading, so I studied what was doing well. I would scour Substack and notice the same categories always did well: The “I quit my corporate job and won at life” manifesto. The “My trauma dump in all lowercase” and the “How AI will replace my job but also save my soul”.

Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a chess match where everyone understands the rules except me. So naturally, I think, “How do I win at chess?” When really I should probably be asking: do I even really want to play chess?

This is probably what every new writer does. When you start, you’re supposed to write a lot, but you also don’t want to just write junk. You want to win in some way. You’re scared of being embarrassed along the way because you’re putting out your puny thoughts in front of the internet, hoping for someone to understand.

I’m making my confusion public, which feels simultaneously too vulnerable and not vulnerable enough. But let’s be honest—some attention would be nice.

The business brain trap

There’s another problem lurking here: my business brain wants to turn every exploration into a product, every essay into a platform, every confused thought into the first post in a series about “The Creative Process” or “Impostor Syndrome in Writing” or some other packageable concept.

In design school, you learn to do mock projects as a part of building your portfolio. Any logo, website or ergonomic spatula you designed would be a valuable asset to show your potential interviewer or client what you can do. You strategically create “fake” but highly relevant work in order to get your foot in the door.

This urge feels productive but in writing it’s actually destructive. It turns authentic confusion into performed confusion. It makes me think about audience and positioning and content strategy instead of just following the thread of whatever I’m actually confused or curious about.

I notice this happening in real-time as I write. A small part of my brain keeps suggesting: “Maybe this could become a course!” or “You could offer this as a part of your personal brand!” And each suggestion pulls me further away from the actual experience I’m trying to translate.

The trap isn’t wanting to share your work—the trap is turning exploration into exploitation before you’ve finished exploring. Some things are allowed to just be things. Some thoughts are allowed to just be thoughts. Not everything has to become a business model.

The word vomit

When you do get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper, it’s often an embarrassing mess. Despite reading three books on “how to write,” none explained the actual mechanical process of thought extraction. So I’ve been figuring it out myself through what I can only describe as controlled disaster.

My process now looks like this: brain dump everything onto the page, let it sit there looking terrible, then dig through it like I’m scavenging for edible bits in compost. Usually those bits don’t connect to each other, so I have to build bridges between them, which requires writing more garbage to figure out what the bridges should be.

The problem is that raw thoughts are terrible at translation. They make perfect sense to me because I have all the context, but they’re often incomprehensible to anyone else.

Henrik Karlsson gave me a revelation when he said to “write for closure”. Write intending to say my last word on the subject. Drill down and write the most comprehensive answer I can, one that unpacks everything I think about the topic or the feeling and resolves my questions. This intention creates a push, a directionality, it gives writing a forward movement.

The mess becomes material to work with rather than just mess. Sift through it and discover what you’re really driving at. Even if it’s not your actual final word, you need to write as if it is.

The beauty of engineering

James Dyson made the cyclone technology in his vacuums transparent because he wanted people to see the engineering at work. The beautiful complexity that makes the whole thing function. There’s something similar with writing—the thinking behind the words should be visible and genuinely interesting, because that thinking is where the real beauty lives.

When you’re bored by your own ideas, it shows. When you’re fascinated by them, that shows too. The most compelling writing comes when you’re first discovering something in real-time rather than reporting on something you’ve already figured out.

That’s why sharing raw thoughts feels so intimidating. Our inner workings are irrational and contradictory. We can have strong opinions that evaporate a week later. This opens us up for critique. But sharing is a messy process, and the most successful writers spend years jumping between positions. It’s the beauty in the struggle and growth that makes it worth reading.

Finding creative velocity

We need a place to publish loose thoughts that isn’t a journal. A journal is a personal stream of consciousness. You still need to process your thoughts through writing, but sometimes you want to remove the weight of an audience, a schedule, and the feeling of doing ‘work’. Instead, you have to find something in between.

Creative velocity is the balance of publishing enough and publishing with enough depth. You don’t want the dread of writing something perfectly to hold you back, but you also need to publish consistently. That’s why it’s best to write for yourself with the frequency that works for you—enough that you keep momentum, but not so much that you’re rushing past the exploration.

Write as an exploration of where you are right now. Write about small observations with precision and depth. Write to translate your interior mess comprehensively. Show your engineering—and all its beauty.