The Emily Gould essay has got me thinking deeply about first-person writing, and it’s made me very self-conscious about it. The closest metaphor I can come up with is, if you loved ice cream, and then you watched someone binge on ice cream until they got sick, and it made you never, ever want to eat ice cream again. I almost never again want to blog the words I, me, or my, even though I’ve done it many times in this paragraph.
I think most of our brains have a gate between the part that thinks and the part that thinks about our thinking. Most of us mostly live in the part that thinks. But my brain’s gate has always been permeable. Years of therapy have helped break that gate down, although I was like this even before therapy. I am often too aware of my thinking, to the point where my thoughts pile up and trip over each other, and I can’t articulate anything because while I’m formulating the words, new thoughts are already forming about what I’m saying. I form counterarguments almost as soon as I form arguments, preemptively judging myself and my arguments so nobody else does it first. I’d rather hit myself with the bludgeon than let someone else do it.
That’s one of my problems — I often think there’s someone with a bludgeon when there isn’t.
So my thinking gets very self-referential and I start to feel like I’m living in a schematic drawing of my life instead of just living. There are other people like this. I used to think it was just me.
A person cannot make a living writing these days. I’m trying to realize that. I’ve long known it. But it’s even more true today, when anyone can have a blog and share their thoughts about anything — their life, politics, culture. The barrier is lower than it ever was. Unfortunately, writing is something I love to do. The only thing I love to do as much as writing is learning. And you can’t make a living learning.
There are people out there who are content not to be ambitious. They’re happy with their lives. They don’t have grand expectations. I wish I were like that.
But wishing is futile. Perhaps there’s a way that I can be like that. I don’t know if there is, but maybe.