It lingers far too often around the back of my mind, fluttering, maneuvering into my body, finding no place but my chest to rest. When I sit down to approach the Thing, I’m uncertain of where to start and what beyonds it might take me or not at all. Is my anxiety about the beginning of It? Is that heaviness stirred by other’s reception and perception of me doing It? Is perfect presentation the way only forward for It? Am I fearful of the unknown steps beyond the one to take, It?
Despite my many reservations, I’ve decided I must confront the Thing.
An Analysis
I reject the notion that we all must “say something” about “everything” “all the time.” These words have fundamentally had the nail driven into them, through millions, even billions (who knows, but I’m too lazy, maybe even scared to find out) of social media posts proclaiming the injustice, Importance, or significance of whatever is going on that day. I genuinely resent those who spout whatever their immediate, physiological response to whatever they encounter in the world, post it to their social media feed, and haven’t spent a thought on it since. I’d describe the ideal as such: the world is somewhere “out there,” beyond the individual and does not include them. This individual merely responds to everything they encounter in the world, having been endowed with the correct impressions about the world. Finally, through every experience, this individual is somehow left unscathed and unmarked and unchanged, because they are an individual, finding themself in the world, with the ability to interpret the world through the Right Ideas I Have About the World.
Admittedly, I resent this most because I grapple deeply with this ideal, this impulse. David Foster Wallace observes a version of this in his commencement at Kenyon College: “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of.”
The move outward, beyond our hard-wired default of absolute me-liocentricism, to and with the Other, has been the challenge of every Big thinker, philosopher, or religious figure throughout History. This grappling has forced me to reconcile, why say anything, or do anything? I don’t want to be heard as naive, or Another White Guy Stepping on Territory He Shouldn’t. I also don’t want to be seen as selfish, because I do have a limited scope of perspective, but most painfully, I don’t want to be seen as wrong. In the midst of Everything That Has Been Said, could I possibly have anything to even remotely contribute?
Many of the Individuals referenced earlier have utterances to mutter, fewer have thought about them, and even less care about the implications. In our digitized, bumbling technological media formats, “saying something” has never had less of a sense of responsibility tied to it. Anonymity allows many to say what they want to say with almost zero necessity for accountability in the real world, in actual community, in embodied life. Almost anyone can say almost anything for someone to somehow engage with. Thoughtful, engaging, multidisciplinary ideas lie on equal consumptive ground with some of the most simplistic, flippant, and frankly, stupid things that you can find on the internet.
For Me, Probably
This mixture of my own thoughts, our collective landscape, and my particular place and time, have forced me to imagine if addressing The Thing is a worthwhile endeavor. Is it selfish to do The Thing, to attempt to take up space in areas that are consisted regularly with men who look like me, and often think similarly to me? Does someone need this more? Even if I had something to contribute, does It matter?
In my personal life, I’ve been reminded of two things, that have offered a freedom to pursue my passion and enjoyment for The Thing.
1. I’m not important.
2. We’re all doing things for our self-actualization.
My own self-aggrandizement has been, is, and probably will be my fatal flaw (and most of ours re: David Foster Wallace).
The Thing is that I enjoy writing. I will not pretend that this endeavor is for anyone but me. I hope to advocate for things beyond myself, outside of myself, and for things beyond our comprehensibility, but this space, this writing, is for me. This space will be a place where I work out my thoughts on things that I’m interested in, going on in my own life, going on in the world, and beyond.
I invite engagement and dialogue in the healthiest of ways, in knowing my ideas are probably not that important, always limited in scope, and that this is largely an exercise in my own journey of what it means to be human.
I’d like to claim that it is all of ours, but I’ll spare you the self-aggrandizement - for now.