How is a person like a poem? (Or, why I am afraid of writing)

This fear of writing is a many-headed beast; too many to soothe or exorcise at once. I’m scared I won’t make any sense, won’t be able to communicate anything and so, in trying, will only isolate myself further; language creating a barrier rather than a bridge, each word a brick in the wall of my tower. Better then to stay silent, at least then I have the scant comfort of the idea of building a bridge across the abyss of solipsism, not much to warm your cockles on but better than having exhausted every possibility of inter-personal communication(!?).

I’m scared I’ll run out of things to say faster than I think I will. Which is confusing and suggests a matrix of beliefs, needs and fears that I haven’t fathomed yet. How deep does this thing go anyway?

When I took LSD last I saw myself held in shells like a Russian doll; shells of narrative, self-talk, beliefs, motivations, fears, and my Self in the middle, soft and baffled. It is this soft and baffled self who has needs, and the rest is narrative: useful for navigating a neoliberal society where a cohesive identity is paramount and success is measured in the strength of your personal achievements and status, but ultimately dangerous as it is very difficult to separate your sense of identity from this narrative, which springs from a paradigm designed to make you feel inadequate. Fuck.

While staying in Plum Village — a Zen Buddhist monastery in France — in Spring 2015, a monk told us, a rabble of young people stunned by the Mediterranean sun and blissed out on each others’ simple and unguarded company, that we were the new punks, and that sitting still on our meditation cushions constitutes a deeply counter-cultural and revolutionary act. Each talk we heard at Plum Village that week was followed by a request that we please try out the teachings for ourselves before taking them on board, or that we please forget everything we had just heard as the truth is inside us anyway: it may sounds spacey but it was a profound relief to be offered guidance by someone who truly had no attachment to whether we subscribed to it or not. This is the opposite of my experience of being in the world usually, which feels like a constant bombardment of demands on my attention, each one implying a deep inadequacy of some kind: are you beautiful enough? is your partner hot enough? do you earn enough money? do you have a career plan? There are alternatives to this bombardment in most sections of society, so even if you’ve managed to escape the dream of a nuclear family, a career path to the end of the rainbow and a shiny car, you can still grapple with: are you politically active enough? do you listen to the news enough? how strong is your counter-culture, does it go deep, I mean really deep, have you got off Facebook? This relentless web of standards and judgements is all the more tricky for the fact that many of us have internalised it to some degree; with Capitalism’s tenets of progress, accumulation and individual success firmly entrenched in our self-perception, we don’t stand much of a chance of inner peace or freedom. Any act which doesn’t strive towards production or acquisition, therefore, is a revolution in itself. Writing, dancing, loving, skating, playing music, sitting still on a meditation cushion, or under a tree, or in a café window or on a park bench or on a street corner, walking with no destination, talking with no agenda, giving gifts; however you find your peace is a deeply worthwhile counter-cultural act.

Learning this has softened my self-criticism and tendency to edit at the same time as writing (basically a recipe for doom, or at least self-sabotage). I’ve also started to understand the web of conditions which have led to this relationship with writing. One aspect, which is entrenched and tricksy, is my position in my family. I’m the eldest of my gaggle of siblings: the four of them followed close behind me, meaning that my Mum was either pregnant, or had a baby or a toddler on her lap, for almost all of my childhood. As a result I think I developed extra ways and means of getting parental and adult attention and approval; among these was a commitment to academia which was supported by an apparently innate and very deep love of reading. The satisfaction, escapism, sensual pleasure and access to meaning and clairvoyance which I find in words, then, is intricately tangled with my sense of self-worth, which came in the form of praise, acceptance and love from my parents (as I perceived it), and praise and approval from teachers and other adults. This is a pretty heady cocktail and one which leaves me basically paralysed; I’m so afraid of ‘failing’ at something which is so close as to be inseparable from my sense of meaning, beauty, order and sense in the world, that I don’t know where to begin. At the same time I derive such a deep and thorough satisfaction from finding and arranging words well, that I don’t know any other way to reach out from the tangle of my subjectivity into the light and air of the world. It’s also, as I said at the start of this, a kind of last resort: I want so much to be read and accepted that I’ve put off and put off publishing any of my writing, even anonymously.

After a recent break-up with somebody very kind and very intelligent, who wasn’t able to read between my lines in the way I needed, I’ve realised I need a community. Of other writers. I know there are other people who feel that the process of being read is the process by which they can untangle their subjectivities, and see themselves a little clearer, and I want to talk.

So here’s an internet smoke signal, a wedge of light under a door cracked-open. Thank you for listening.