In this era of Substack and Medium and every conceivable lit magazine out there, I spend a lot of time wondering, “what’s the fucking point?” Why write at all, when there’s so much of it out there? The era of the internet means everyone is a writer, and while not everyone is a good writer, everyone feels entitled to put their work out there. Writing should be democratic, after all.
But as writing becomes ever-more commodified, this enshittification of writing has me looking around at my contemporaries and having second thoughts on this whole endeavor.
What’s the goal, anyway? To make money? To get attention? To process some long-held insecurity about not getting enough love as a child? None really feel like my reasons.
I started writing at a young age, encouraged by both teachers and parents. I would race home from school to write in my LiveJournal about the minutiae of my day with such urgency. Looking back, it reads something like Gawker or Nikki Finke might’ve published, full of real names and banal, catty details. It was the dawn of the second decade of the internet and I wasn’t sure how it could or should be used.
I took composition in high school and excelled. I wrote and wrote, again encouraged by my teachers. Senior year, we crafted an essay a week in AP Lit, and those essays were formative to my style. I’ve made a living cutting and carving and cleaving the writing of others, but never struck out on my own. I’ve spent the last fifteen years (I’m now in my early late–30s) thinking that I am, somehow, deep down, a writer.
I can’t conceive of doing anything else. At this point, I doubt I could do much else. I’m terrible at compromising, working with others, and keeping a schedule. I’ve lived alone and worked for myself for so long now that I doubt I can pull off a relationship, let alone a “real job.”
Yet I have strong and lasting hesitations about writing. I’ve watched—and participated in—the rise of the internet since the late 90s. uJournal, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter… I’ve played around with all. I watch how these platforms corrupt and destroy. Social media makes people petty and rude and brash in ways they’d never be in real life, and it’s corroded the social fabric. (It has done some good, too, but that’s another post.) Discourse and connection has been so thoroughly commodified that people no longer seem to remember the Before Times.
I want to write because I love the challenge. The goal of writing is the same as therapy or mediation or solitude or exploration. To write is to think, and to learn to think in new ways. To write is to uncover truth, both about the world around me and myself.
It’s here where I’m cowed into silence. I see how people react when you write truthfully. Write honestly about a sports team or economic model or favorite actor and they, well, those people that don’t agree don’t handle it well.
This seems especially true in America. (Full disclosure: I am an American. I have lived overseas for prolonged periods of time, but I know this country far more intimately than I know any other, so consider this a from-here-on-out conditional.) America is a unique kind of unhinged: individualistic, tightly wound, and very litigious. Being honest here will inevitably piss someone off, and they will have no compunctions doing whatever they can to make your life hell.
This is why I choose to write anonymously.
The opposite, though, must be true: to be a writer, you must be able to hear the truth from others…and yourself. If I’m honest with you, dear reader, I don’t know that I’ve wanted to be honest with myself thus far. I’ve had a quiet little life, and the older I grow the more I want it to stay that way. All it takes is one post to become the internet’s Main Character and your life is turned upside down.
Yet what I aim to do here is be honest with you: as honest with you as I know how. And to be as honest with myself, for better and worse. I have a lot to say, but I’m just looking for a little courage to say it.
So stay tuned, be gentle, and let’s go exploring.