Honest writing · 17 October 2021

Note: In honor of the mental labour I endured 6 months ago but was too scared (or lazy?) to share with the world, I am periodically publishing these old notes which I call “honest writing”.

“The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, we cease being captive to the myth of normalcy — the cultural tyranny that tells us there are a handful of valid ways to be human and demands of us to contort into these accepted forms of being.” – Maria Popova

And so it seems yet another year has gone by – one of great strife, deep changes to the undercurrent of my being, a certain sadness, a heightened sensitivity, a gradual climbing out, an impetus to explore and a desire to curl up and turn my face away from the world. 

Honest writing is borne of honest living, and when I ponder why I have not published a piece of writing in almost a year, I can only conclude that it must have something to do with how I have been living. I have been in constant flux, insecure about what I am doing or why I am doing it, steeped insufferably in the language of the market, pretending ironically that I am inspired by the vision of a world quantifiably carved, catalogued and capitalized. 

I have not written because I have been anxious.

I have not written because I have felt like I lost my confidence.

I have not written because writing demands truth and soul, and my world has been caught in a psychic substrate where those two words have no place in our vocabulary.

In writing again, I am attempting to claw back to my honest self. I will forgo spelling and grammar checks and I will abandon my obsession with perfection, haunted by the question of who reads this and thinks what.

The trouble with spending 80% of my waking-life in a market context is that I’ve internalized the idea that for my thoughts (and by extension, myself) to be valuable, they must be marketable. They must have an audience. They must make crisp conclusions about relevant things that relevant people want to know about. They must build a canon of knowledge that will be uniquely mine, and then I will be able to point to that canon of knowledge when I am in search of better things, transforming it from true voice to stepping stone.

The inner tension that gnaws at me daily is this: I wish to live in secret and in public at the same time; to find delectable comfort in having no one know me and everyone love me at once, to reject the world and in the same breath be a slave to its beauty.