Peter M. Ball

It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits that felt impossible a week before (or lose the thread of good habits that you’d like to keep ) .

Your morning ritual that gets you up, dressed, and out the door can be thrown off by the simple act of leaving your shoes in the wrong place, or running out of shampoo while you’re in the shower. Morning routines are often a chain of habits, each one triggering the next, and one small crack will echo through your morning. Those shoes you left in the wrong spot mean you’re thinking instead of doing, watching the clock to check times and fretting about what needs to be done instead of running through the morning on autopilot. 

Before too long, you’ve walked out the door without your lunch. Or your keys. Or those documents you needed. All because you left your shoes beside the couch, instead of tucking them under your bed. 

Routines get thrown by little things.

Which means unleashing a big change on your life – starting a new job, inviting a partner to cohabitate with you, a major illness – will echo through every habit you’ve built up and disrupt them all. 

The upside: they build fast, and you can connect them to your old habits with a little effort.

The downside: it feels like you’re living in the heart of chaos, and life has spun out of control for a while. Because you’ve got to think and plan to do things again, for the first time in a long while.

And the easiest routines to pick up are usually the ones designed to help you cope and soothe the frustration of all this chaos in your world, rather than the ones that move you forward and thrive in the new normal. 

Rebuilding the useful routines is work, and it pays to do it consciously instead of hoping it’ll come along. 

So, a little exciting news that’s not being widely shared yet: about an hour ago I accepted a job as the Programs Manager for the 2022 Brisbane Writer’s Festival, starting next Wednesday. It’ll be my first foray into full-time employment in about seven or eight years, and one of the few full-time gigs I’ll be working for longer than six months. I am excited, and daunted, and a bit terrified—while I’ve worked on big events before, the scale and scope of BWF is way larger than anything I’ve done in the past, particularly in this role.

The job also presents an interesting challenge: rebuilding all my writing and publishing systems from the ground up, and incorporating more people into the process. My partner and I had been talking about creating space for them to get more hands-on with the company, and Brain Jar titles sell well enough that we can bring in freelancers to cover a lot of the jobs that used to land on my desk. But there’s still a lot of moving parts that rely on my expertise, my own writing projects that I’d like to finish, and a PhD thesis that I need to polish off  sometime between now and March.

My radio silence for the last couple of days has been the result of grappling with just how much life would change if I took the job, and making sure that my beloved and I were both onboard with that.  It’s exciting, but it’s a lot of change and new systems slotting into place very, very fast and it’s going to be a test of my ability to implement systems and live that ampersand life of multiple competing priorities. 

So, in the very near future, I’ll likely have to make some choices and weigh up different things on my to-do list. I’m doing my best not to make rash decisions today (because the whole thing is both shiny and terrifying), but I’ll be mapping out commitments over the weekend and figuring out what to scale down while I get my feet under me and figure out what is still feasible to build on this new foundation.

We’ve been watching Doom Patrol over the last week, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention and imbuing it with energy to effect change in the world.

For Morrison, a hypersigil was an extended work of narrative that served the same purpose. Stories designed to change the self and the world. He created three works that were explicitly hypersigils—The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and The Filth—all of which were created during or around his Doom Parol run.

Morrison is batshit insane, of course, and that’s part of his charm as a creator, but it’s interesting to watch some of his more out-there ideas get teased out by other writers.

For example, the curation of a social media profile lends itself to the process of sigilization, with users offering up a vision of their life and what’s meaningful in it, investing it with attention and intention, then creating a feedback loop where that increased attention reinforces the vision they’re curating.

Social media as subconscious magic powered by a story of the self told by the self. Fictions that make themselves real.

And what’s interesting about this is the way Morrison sounded like an outright mad bastard when he first started banging on about hypersigils on the internet, but it was also a time when this kind of active curation of the self wasn’t commonplace. We passively received more narratives than we created, and the choice to incorporate something part of your identity was relatively contained. You might be a hardcore SF fan around other hardcore SF fans, but you probably weren’t sharing your weird-ass Babylon 5 theories with friends at work.

Now, the bits of your life deemed important enough to like, share, or talk about on social media are likely to bleed out into the rest of your life. Every day you make choices about the way you think of yourself, which changes the way other people think of you.

Morrison may be barking mad, but the hypersigil is an intriguing metaphor for what’s become an incredibly commonplace way of engaging with the world.