For most of my life I have been quite a private person with regards to my online presence. I have no doubt that my hesitance to contribute my unabridged thoughts to the public sphere was due to the fact that judgment abounds, especially for women and especially in the Internet Age. My rationale for limiting the broadcasting of my thoughts to my inner monologue was that no one can place a value on what they can’t perceive, for better or worse. Up until now, I have refrained from posting my writing because I valued shielding my cherished innermost musings from being tainted by outside involvement over any potential benefit. After all, once you release something into the Internet it can henceforth never be purely yours, instead under the eye of the collective. This is the price of admission into the thought arena of the global mind.
I picked up writing because I felt in need of an outlet for self-expression. I chose this avenue because it’s one of the only skills that I found I had somewhat of an aptitude for. If I were ever given my pick of self-expression talents, I would pick music every time without hesitation. Music has an indescribable way of transmitting emotion to media with fluid elegance, unencumbered by words. My stumbling block with writing as art (poetry notwithstanding) is that it’s too literal for its own good: the literal format can cause raw emotion to be lost in translation in a way it rarely is in music. In my eyes, a sizable element of the mystique of music lies in its ability to communicate feeling wordlessly, the allure of emotion left unspoken yet felt. Music has the ability to be so profound because everything left unsaid by the musical medium makes for infinite interpretive possibilities, a veritable prismatic spectrum of human emotion. By comparison, words seem to put all of the writer’s cards on the table in so bluntly that it feels almost humiliating.
There’s an undeniable safety in keeping your emotional cards close to your chest, which is why it took me a long time to look past that to see that there’s other things to be gained by being open. Even though I reveled in the unabashed, witty honesty of my favorite personal essayists (Jia Tolentino, Tavi Gevinson, and Cazzie David, to name a few), I still found myself hesitant to really empty my mind on the page, to undertake and transcribe the process of peeling back the protective layers of my psyche to see what I could mine at the core. It just seemed so vulnerable and exposed compared to music, where people can express their emotions without ever speaking of them, if they so choose. I suppose that the common thread through all self-expression is that truly rewarding and resonant art comes from baring your soul, and all of the honesty and vulnerability that entails.
I’m ultimately drawn to writing by the way that defining the nebulous thoughts floating around in my head helps me to see myself and my relationship to the world with renewed clarity, and how transcribing the ephemera of my inner monologue lends it a sense of permanence in a world that seems to grow ever more transient by the day. In having undertaken writing as an art form, I necessarily must relinquish my reluctance to express and name my unmitigated self. I take comfort in knowing that if my writing helps just one person to reconcile with their unabridged selves, as my favorite essayists have done for me, then it will have been worth it.
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