Writing in Obscurity

The other day my friend SteveG celebrated his 100,000th visit to Philosopher's Playground, quite an accomplishment indeed!

That got me to thinking about the obscurity I enjoy on this site. I do relish that I post here in quasi-obscurity; this is a secret place because I write under a pseudonym, and I have had a grand total of about three readers per year since I started posting on this site.

In writing, so much of what I fear is revealing myself. Of course my ego is a big part of the problem, I want to get it right and look good doing so. But my worry about saying the right thing is a bit more precise than that. More than a fundamental mistrust of what others think, I do not trust what I have to say. As soon as I think a thought I wonder if I'm sufficiently political, the right politics, and oh I don't want to obscure the personal that's a deeply held value as well, that the personal is political. Too emotional? Not revealing enough? Too self absorbed? (irony of ironies, that most self absorbed thought pops up quite frequently). Should-ing all over myself before I can get anything coherent down onto the page, in other words.

Much of this journey to find my own voice is the simple need for practice. The more I write the more I learn to hear it, the still small voice.

I think of SteveG, who has a funny, quirky personality, and whose blog is so reflective of the person that he is. Same for Aspazia, whose site is so her.

I realize that I am not unusual, writer's block is not at all new, and a lack of confidence in one's own voice is as old as the story of inequality, real and perceived. This is the human condition outside of the Garden.

But in thinking about why I write, and why I'm committing to this journey, I realize that the fundamental source of this unmoored feeling is that I live with many selves, many voices, and I inhabit many places, in memory and in my daily life. We all, do, we have game faces, work faces, personae that belong to the family environment.

Politics, in that mix, is difficult, and personal life unsure, as I don't come from any one place and politics seems to be about the answers, not the questions. (By politics I don't mean electoral machinery, but the Classical notion of it, the basic questions of how to best live in the world with others, that transcend national spaces, questions that are about humanity in general).

Will writing heal that rift? Writing is deeply connected to healing, its therapeutic value cannot be underestimated. But there's something about formation and creation in the process of engaging with the word and the world, so I'm not only repairing the effect of a bad habit of fearfulness, but participating in the creation of something new.

That is why I write.

And I'm writing this to myself now - I've decided to continue to write in obscurity for a while, to develop the habit of saying what I think. Kicking the should out of appropriate, well behaved, right answer sort of writing. What would I say if no one were listening? What would I say if I weren't listening?

I'm finding more and more that writing is less about squeezing my ideas out, formed as words, but allowing them to take shape as I go through the process. That is political, but not in a public way.

So I'm not sure what my voice sounds like yet. But as I discover it I think I will inhabit causes, advocacy, and find a direction toward a life that is lived for others, without getting caught up in the paralyzing stink of should.