I stopped writing for a few weeks. Pretty unintentionally, honestly. I had some things I was working on for this blog, but they just weren't happening, either due to diminishing interest or basic distraction, I'm not sure. In that lag time, I started questioning just what I was doing here. If I had anything to add to the conversation. If it wasn't slightly conceited of me to even try.
Thus beginning that all-too-familiar spiral of doubt and insecurity, landing on that paralyzing plateau where you can almost trick yourself into thinking you didn't really want to write anyway, if not for that little voice whispering "Liar!" late into the night.
And isn't that, really, the beginning of all limited thought? Those limits we impose upon ourselves? On others? Whether we admit to them or not, those are the limits we most strongly believe in--we reinforce them by the action we choose to take or avoid, the relationships we cultivate or ignore, and the challenges we accept or shrink away from. Those choices become our life's mythology, the basis not only of our own lives, but how we interact with the world, our capacity for compassion, the underlying sense of regret or contentment that motivates every action whether we acknowledge it or not.
It's easy to get trapped in a mythology you didn't even know you were creating.
One of the things I wanted to write about in college but couldn't seem to fit in (and yes, I'm aware of the irony), was how the academic tendency to remove or down-play any sort of personal history or connection to the material at hand is dishonest and intensely problematic. We all have an agenda. We all have an outcome we'd like to perpetuate. And it seems to me that this sort of...sterile...approach to academia (and perhaps in a broader sense, to learning in general) allows us to sidestep our motivations, to imagine that our quest for knowledge is pure and somehow unencumbered by our politics. That we take in all information as an unbiased observer, making a completely rational analysis, and basing our decisions on that.
There's a part of me that wishes I could do this (or anything, really) in that depersonalized academic tradition, and I suppose when I started it, that was my intention. I thought that this work would become clearer, somehow, if I left my personal life out of it.
But that's pretty much bullshit, isn't it? It's easier, certainly, but still...bullshit. I mean, to sit from on high and pretend to understand things on such a meta level without allowing anyone to see my own process, my own struggle with authenticity, my own constant battle to break down the barriers that exist for myself? Anything that comes of this under that mythology is a lie. So.
This is the thing I had to write tonight, and for whatever reason, this felt like the place. Writing gets lost in the online journal, and I just don't need another disjointed Word document floating around waiting to be shuffled into something that may or may not come to fruition. This seems more...accountable...somehow. Because if I'm going to be honest about trying to bust through my own limitations, it only makes sense to do it publicly, even if only theoretically so. If I'm going to ask other people to do it, and if my ultimate goal is to provide a method for anyone, in any field, to do so, it would be hypocritical to hide my own process.
