qualms and misgivings

Ok. I have a feeling this is going to be a very long post.

Have been debating whether or not to lower this blog to the level of a journal in which I thrash out my inner moral and existential conflicts/ ruminations for the internet world to see. Apart from a few posts such as ‘and she shall be called woman’ and ‘white fear’ I’ve steered clear of this for several reasons.
1. I know that people (friends, family, acquaintances) read this blog from time to time, and I would never want to hurt or offend them by disrespecting their beliefs. But I think that there is a difference between objecting to something, contesting a point of view, and being disrespectful to a person, and I think most people know this. So, I’m going to put that worry aside….
The next two reasons, I acknowledge, are inherently narcissistic ones:

2. These kind of questions are for me the most important questions in my life – discussing them for everyone to see is kind of like bearing my soul. This is what I am pre-occupied with most of the time. This is the ‘inner me’. Also I feel completely inadequate trying to talk about ‘big grown up things’ like philosophy and religion. Sure I’m fascinated by them, but it’s not like I have anything new to say…

3. Writing is my ‘thing’. Or what I consider to be my ‘thing’. It is difficult not to let my entire self-worth depend on whether both I myself and other people perceive me to be a good writer. I know this is going to sound incredibly melodramatic, but writing becomes almost a terrifying prospect for me sometimes. If I fail at writing, I fail full stop. I feel as though I have worthwhile things to express in words – on paper. My greatest fear is that I won’t be able to ‘get them out’. It becomes almost an exhausting prospect, then, because when trying to express myself, I’m using the very medium in which my entire self-worth seems inextricably embedded in – written words. Consequently, I’m hyper-conscious when writing that whatever comes out on the page when I’m putting 100% into it, is (at least as I perceive it) the sum of myself. That knowledge, and the knowledge that someone else, someone reading my writing, could be doing it better, could be more articulate, more eloquent… well it’s almost paralyzing.

I guess the connection between 2 and 3 is obvious. Using the medium my self-worth is ingrained in to try and convey the things most dear and important to me – things I’m still figuring out, things I don’t know enough of yet to even form an opinion on – seems like the hardest thing in the world. Why? Because my pride and self-esteem are both at stake. I’m putting the extent of my skills and knowledge out there while knowing that they are insufficient.

The biggest temptation for me is to procrastinate, or even refrain from writing until I ‘know more’. In my head, there is some kind of obscure level of understanding or general knowledge I need to reach before I can legitimately attempt to write about ‘the big stuff’. But I was talking a couple of months back about this with Alice and she said something like ‘when will anyone ever be done learning?’ So I think I need to relinquish my pride on this one.

I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye today (which was on my JANUARY summer reading list). Even though it’s soppy I’m putting in a quote that comforted me when I read it.

“You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and sickened by human behaviour…. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer , someone will learn something from you.”

This kind of prompted me to reconsider my reservations about expressing my thoughts. Sure, I’m not a theologian or a scientist or a philosopher or even a phD student. If any one of the above took me to task I’m pretty sure they’d annihilate me. But that’s not the point, is it? I have no delusions that my writing is pure poetry or that any of my ideas are original or that I comprehend the obscure thoughts of philosophical genuis’ . But I want to learn, to improve, to understand, so there’s no reason for me to be ‘ashamed’ of where I’m at now. And if people read this and think “god, that person’s stupid, they have no idea what the fuck they’re on about” well, they’re probably right! But I’m choosing not to care (or at least to try to not care ) Because I don’t think I’m going to find the answers I’m looking for if I avoid questioning and formulating and expressing my thoughts. I think actually that for me, that’s exactly the way in which I might find a way to make sense of things. (That and alot of reading, of course…)