thoughts on writing and being perceived
hello to my imaginary audience!
Writing has always been my most powerful outlet.
Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been writing stories. The ability to organise my thoughts into prose and onto pages is one that I have never taken for granted, although it is an ability that I have an extremely complicated relationship with.
I have created this Substack profile as a platform to share my thoughts with anyone who cares to read them, if not only for myself. However, this has come with its own set of challenges. I wanted to allow myself the space to emerge from the black hole of my thoughts and self-doubt. However, in my first attempts to write candidly for this page, I found that I was writing for all of the wrong reasons.
As I have gotten older, the pressure of writing coherent and meaningful stories has almost been too much to bear. I had begun to notice in adulthood that writing was no longer a therapeutic outlet where I could unload all of the thoughts I had in my mind into a messy, incoherent scrawl on the page. The pressure on myself to be perfect, to be the next Virginia Woolf, to tell the stories that I loved to immerse myself in is something that I had imposed upon myself but simultaneously found impossible to let go of.
Sometimes I feel as if when my pen hits the paper, my words turn to dust - a fleeting thought that vanishes into thin air almost as quickly as it appeared.
The fear of being perceived, even by people that I know and love, is something that I know I am not alone in struggling with. In recent years, I have lost sight of what made writing truly special and I often find myself writing and rewriting things to suit how I believe others would perceive it.
Writing, the thing that I once loved so much, had become a chore, and it was draining to be constantly worrying about how other people would interpret my ideas, and in turn, myself as a person. The voice in the back of my mind was nagging me with thoughts of self-doubt, telling me that I was not as intelligent or as capable as I had once believed myself to be.
By allowing myself to perform for others, I had destroyed the one outlet that I found the most sacred. For me, the significance of writing lies in its capacity to convey stories from within myself, chronicling my deepest innermost thoughts and feelings without the pressures of the expectations of others. And now I am continuously trying to remind myself what a privilege that is!
This seems like a fitting start to my journey of taking charge of my pen, or in this case, my keyboard in an attempt to become my most authentic self. The ability to write and tell stories is to share my innermost thoughts, feelings and fears with the world in a way that seems separate from myself. To put pen to paper and create a place that is totally hidden from the eyes of others, a place where I can shed my skin and bear my soul, a place to sit and ponder.