Over the past few days of doing my writing, I have started feeling a sense of offness, some sadness, and aloneness. Today I decided to pause writing and make space to relate with that.
Sometimes when I feel stuck I like to put on my headphones and record myself speaking to myself, as if I was speaking to another person. I *am* speaking to a person, after all.
The thing that helps me in this process is first naming all the pieces that are floating in my mental and emotional space and then checking if there is a way I could hold them with more spaciosuness.
How else I could relate to my situation, so that it does not feel like a problem but rather something interesting I can inquire into.
Below is a transcript of my monologue, with all the likes, ands and ums.
[Transcript]
Today I feel like I would like to do a free-flow spoken reflection instead of writing a post.
Because there's this thing that I've been experiencing since I've started writing about relationality daily.
And I want to put some words to it so I can understand it better.
To do that, I want to try and just name a few pieces of the puzzle that I think are connected, but maybe I will yet discover how they are connected by eliciting them.
So the first piece is there's a sense of aloneness that I experience when I am writing every day, publishing some things that are quite exciting for me, pushing my comfort zone, interacting with my creative energy.
It's been feeling really good to feel. Capable of being in this process this whole week.
I feel like there's something quite reassuring and maybe after like now many years of trying to figure out how to become more confident in expressing myself online.
It feels like a moment to sort of celebrate that it has become comfortable, it has become the thing I can do. So I'm excited about that.
And also somehow I feel alone in this process. I realize that there is a way in which I want more feedback. I want more interaction. I want more dialogue.
I think I don't want my writing to just be static artifacts. I think I want them to be conversation starters.
There's been a few times this week when a friend resonated with something that I've written. I think that's what I'm most interested in. Are the thoughts that I'm having resonating with thoughts that other people are having?
Or maybe they are not resonating maybe they're in fact triggering in some sense maybe they just seem um like not true in some ways i think that would also be interesting.
But i think right now I’m missing, I think I’m missing that sense of dialogue um and i feel like i'm still … I don't want to say supposed to.
I feel like there's probably something that I could do, some structured method that maybe I could create, or maybe some personal outreach that I could initiate so I receive more of that.
I think there are some real forces that's then in the way of someone putting something out in the world and other people.
First of all, noticing it. Second of all, engaging with it. And third of all, dialoguing back at the person.
The most basic one just being our attention spans and how much time we have each day to engage with all the many contents that get produced online.
So I think I am drawn to the idea of creating some sort of a particular space, maybe like a field of communication between me and some selected individuals who are actively interested in exploring relationality.
Like I can think of a few friends and I'm wondering, well, maybe I could create a group chat, or even just reach out to them individually first and start the conversation.
It feels like a cool and obvious thing to do in some sense.
But in some other sense, I haven't done it still. And I feel like there's something in the way of doing that.
And I think those are insecurities. Like, there's probably some way in which I am afraid of being seen as a person who says: Hey, you, you should care about my writing. You should care about my thoughts.
And I wonder why this possibility is so scary. I mean, there's something cultural, social here. Like, I imagine, I don't know, maybe when I was a child and in school and there could be a mix of, like, hearing messages from my parents, some sort of, like, teachings or warnings to, like, be careful to not be too boastful and to not draw too much attention to yourself, to, like...
be empathetic to other people and have like a view that is larger than just you and what you want.
I think there's definitely been some messages like that.
And then on the other hand, I think probably just through my own experience, I've also realized that I want to be a part of the group. I want to be accepted and included.
And probably there have been times when some other kids would behave in a sort of self-centered way. And they would have probably gotten criticized or ostracized or rejected from the group.
And maybe that was like an implicit learning that you have to be careful with how much you're talking about yourself and your things.
Those are some of my guesses, but I wonder what is a healthier way I could relate to this?
Because if I flip the card and I imagine my friends sending me a link or telling me about a project that they're starting that is deeply meaningful to them, I think my first reaction would be to want to support them.
And I would be interested to know what they are interested in. It would be a portal into knowing something more about my friend and their soul, their creative endeavors, their vision for things.
So that's one thing I think I could try imagining that people might feel similarly towards me.
And then, and then also yesterday I was connecting with something that feels a bit more vulnerable to share, which is that I've certainly had times when I felt, I don't know if it's envious or maybe it's just sort of sad and bad about myself.
When I have seen some of the people I know or my friends, like just put out something really cool out into the world and make progress on a project and like deliver a thing that is resonating with the crowd.
And there's definitely been times when seeing that has made me… it's like sort of triggered some insecurities in me of, can I do this as well?
Like, what am I doing with my life? Like, what is the legacy that I'm leaving behind?
And, It could spin out a whole existential crisis, basically.
And so I would not like to be the source of that for other people by putting my stuff out into the world.
But this feels like a really toxic logic. Yeah. This idea of keeping oneself small comes up.
And I guess I have learned to hold that insecurity of mine, to not let it stand in the way of me supporting my friends and engaging with their realities and seeing them for who they are.
And so I think I could also trust that my friends, people who I already consider to be of high integrity and like metacognition that is needed to hold all the different parts of them.
I think I could trust them to also do that.
And perhaps in most cases, there just won't be any of that. I imagine that that is probably the default, although the part of me that is afraid inside, it is afraid that the default is that actually it would somehow distance people away from me to share my work with them.
And actually, when I think about it, I used to have this... challenge when i was working for companies as well like it would always feel sort of weird to try and promote the product that i'm building or helping build with other people to my friends um because i think there's a fear of being um like salesy or um yeah, of basically trying to sort of like connect with them through like a product.
Which somehow just like feels like genre clash between like the relational and the capitalist genre.
But if I take a different stance and see it as a, hey, I'm working for this company and I'm helping build a product that I think is actually very useful and cool, I think it feels less wrong to have a desire to share that with people who, um, care about you and you care about them.
And so I feel like there's this possibility of reframing and maybe rescuing what we call self-promotion or marketing, which are very negatively loaded terms.
And I can see how much the negativity that surrounds these concepts and activities and the ways that they often are conducted without integrity and with focus on profits over humans.
I can see how that is now making it hard for me to bring my work to people so that I can connect with them about the things that matter to me.
So I've been thinking about it because in some sense, I realized that writing daily and expressing myself is not the main challenge that I face now.
In some sense, I actually need to update and just accept the fact that I can do it now.
This is something that has become more easeful over years, really, of trying to make it more easeful.
So that's great.
But then I'm discovering there's a new challenge here, which is:
How do I feel like excited about my work in connection with other people who I want to connect with me through my work?
Yeah. And I don't really know the answer just yet, but somehow I feel like just eliciting this inquiry is going to catalyze some new thoughts and ways of relating hopefully over the next few days that will, yeah, that will help me try some new things.
Perhaps I’ll essentially do a little bit of an exposure therapy experiment on these insecure, fearful parts of me that I believe have been set in motion by a lot of how we culturally relate to the act of spreading information and making it known to others what one is about and working on.
I don't think it needs to be this hard.
I think it can be more intuitive and easeful as well, and connecting, and sort of generative.
And I would like to explore this in parallel with doing my writing this week.
Photo credits go to Monstera Production.
making space to relate with myself