I like to document life. Torn pages from a notebook, letters from my high school friends, old movie tickets, a beat-up friendship bracelet my friend made for me in high school. I have a folder full of things like this that I have never been able to throw away. None of it is worth anything, but I hold on to it all as tokens of a life lived.
The same instinct is why I write. I am a compulsive journaller. I carry a couple of journals with me all the time. Constantly journalling in the form of voice notes or messages to myself on WhatsApp. I know and have validated enough that I like the act of writing.
What I have not worked out for myself is publishing.
See, writing is the most naked form of creation according to me. When I write and share publicly it makes me a lot more vulnerable. Words have immense power and the way you string a combination of words together can make a massive emotional impact. I try my best at it but I just can't pretend to be smart. Like anyone I am trying to find my place in the world so I write not to preach but to document myself and it exposes me to a certain extent where I don't want to be seen.
Weirdly, the other way I express what I am feeling is through design. I make a relentless amount of posters to say what I am feeling, but it never bothers me to put that out. I am as emotional about my design as I am about my writing, and yet I have no problem publishing my design but I do with my writing.
After much retrospection I have realised that the reason design doesn't bother me is that I can mask my true feelings behind aesthetics. Nobody else knows what I am trying to say except me, which makes me feel safe.
But unlike design, writing has no mask. There is no visual to stand behind. It's just me and my thoughts. Raw, naked and exposed.
And under that, the actual fear, the one I have been circling this whole essay: I feel people will see through me and realise I am dumb. There. It looks smaller written down than it does in my head and I suppose that is the point.
Honestly, this is a problem I have created for myself. The feedback from my blog has always been really nice and I have made so many amazing connections because of how much people resonated with my blog. The audience I am afraid of has actually never turned up. This blog was always meant for me rather than an audience, and I have made that audience so much more important in my head than it needs to be.
I don't think I can switch off the voice in my head but what I will be aiming for is turning it down. I started this essay by establishing that writing is about documentation of my life for me. The same way a photograph pauses a memory in time. My writing helps me capture my emotion in time. And I am messy. My emotions are messy and hence my writing will be too. It will always be hard for me to put myself out there and one essay does not fix that.
But I will keep trying. This blog has given me more good things than I can remember. The people who wrote back, the friends I made through it, all of it happened because someone read something I nearly didn't post and recognised themselves in it.
I would rather have that than be safe.