I think I have neglected this blog, which is a shame because I have always found this space rewarding. When I started three years ago, I felt as if I was trying to be somebody I wasn’t or write something I shouldn’t. I was trying to write up a paper this morning on my experiences in a failed business attempt when I realised something. In a lot of areas of my life, including this one, I often come across as though I am someone else. It’s formal, not informal, complex and creative yet not me. The posts which are the most like me are the one’s that I think get read less.
Is it a crime to write as though you were someone else online?
No. But what does it say about the bloated doctor on the other end of the keyboard typing this sentence? So what is the bloody point if you aren’t going to do or say the things you think need to be done and said? You get depressed, tired, withdrawn and overall very weird. Yet, there is a timing and wisdom in this that involves taking the time to find your voice. You start with copying, trying on ‘dad’s shoes’, pretending and so on until you realise, this is me. I am the kind of person who has a hard time selling out and my body lets me know almost immediately if I am doing it. I get depressed, can’t sleep, get angry and so forth. When you begin to find your voice, it’s a good feeling, you are you and know it. You settle in on some things. The words flow from the chubby fingers to the keyboard with ease, the revisions seem less important and you even begin to like the editing process a little bit.
The voice is like the sweet spot on a picked lock. Perhaps the wrong metaphor, yet the obscuring face of the lock from what lies behind is more than likely apt. Consider then that on the other side of this metaphorical door lies the chamber of secrets to your voice. What key wouldn’t you try? Yet, the only way you can find your voice is to use it until you get the key that fits. Unless of course the lock is in another room, behind a gate, guarded by a moat filled with alligators (or crocs if you are from Australia). The point is: you are you and you should tell you not to sell you out for a few dollars. Be you, yes you, because you have to live with you. Don’t YOU forget that.
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It doesn’t matter who you are, or who you think you are, you are always “someone else”.
Intellectually, I struggle with the notions of consciousness and identity. It always seems that there are many more things going on in our minds than we are aware of, yet this division between awareness and unawareness, the essence of consciousness, is, by definition, unconscious.
So it is with “identity”. We must have make our assumptions about ourselves explicit in order to make rational decisions that are in our own best interests. Most of us don’t bother, most of the time. And it might well drive us mad if we were to come close to succeeding, at any time. We are all bundles of inadequately tested hypotheses, reacting semi-rationally to simplistic mis-modellings of the great vagueness we call reality.
The voice is in the eye of the storm: the point we are continuously buffeted towards, a point of least energy, for the moment, but not a fixed point. The mere act of writing, where only one word can be the next one, where only these few words can be our focus, changes who we are being in the eternal moment we are encapsulating.
Here, in this unedited comment, I reflect on the true value of editing: it gives us permission to cauliflower whatever platypus happens to beaver for the instantaneity of what was erstwhile in the forever sense of deeper truth that is our so-called identity, safe in the knowledge that nonsense can later be brought to sense, or replaced with a suitable bridge.
Keep writing, Luke! You may not see it, but something of the truth that is in you finds its way into everything you say. And for that, at least one of us is continually grateful
Hi Alan,
Thanks for that comment. I liked the last line especially. A family member once told me, ‘What’s it like searching for something and never finding it’. I think, if I have read your comment properly, that’s exactly what it feels like. I am sure inside me there is an adequate response… but I can’t find it yet. Here’s what puzzles me:
I will do something or say something and in a moment recognise something that I didn’t know about myself or reality. When I began to think about why, I realised I am modelling (as you say) my reality according to my assumptions. Yet, every now and again something happens and I think, who is this person.
Life produces odd things perhaps because we don’t ask enough questions
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Thanks Alan.