if i'm honest with myself

i wanna be somewhere new already

Kirtimukha from Meenakshi Temple Gopuram, Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Photo by Jayraj T. P.

I don’t want to write about writing in all of my posts, but I must also concede that there might be some amount of it that I need to get out of my system before I get to the point where I’m not thinking about it anymore. I’d take “write beautifully without writing about writing” over “tediously writing about writing”, but I would take “tediously writing about writing” over “not writing at all”. Anyway maybe I can just collapse this into a footnote once I’m done with it. I seem to have forgotten that lately, and by lately I mean “in the past couple of years”. I may have unwittingly developed a fixation on a fantasy model of writing rather than facing the actual reality of how my best writing happens. And really, right now where I am, I don’t even care that much about doing my best writing. I just want to do writing that feels honest.

Over the years, I’ve come to find that honesty isn’t nearly as straightforward as it might seem. I still love Black Widow’s quote from Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014): “The truth is a matter of circumstance. It's not all things to all people all the time. And neither am I.” I wouldn’t say that the quote is necessarily the wisest thing anyone has ever said about Truth, but it’s mildly surprising to me (and fun) that it’s in a Marvel movie.

It’s possible to paint an dishonest picture of reality without telling a single lie. And… this might sound a little intense, but we pretty much all do it to some degree, often unintentionally, because of narrative bias and imperfect knowledge. And for simplicity’s sake, let’s not even talk about social relations, family, friends, living in a society, etc. It’s tricky enough to be properly honest with ourselves. I wrote a whole book on the subject, and I think in some ways it may have actually made it harder for me to be properly honest with myself, even as I continue to get better at the nitty-gritty of it.

Let me just think out loud about this for a bit. How do I feel about quotes like “honesty is the best policy” and “the truth will set you free”? I think there’s merit to it. Am I currently being honest with myself? I don’t think I am telling myself any lies… but like I said earlier, that isn’t actually proof of honesty. I think it may be worth sketching up some concepts like “deep honesty” or “resonant honesty”, which is separate from the mere absence of verifiable untruths.

It’s possible to bully someone without explicitly saying a single mean thing to them. One way to do this is to pretend to be interested in them when you aren’t really. Now let’s make this scenario murkier. Consider someone who isn’t trying to be a bully, isn’t trying to be hurtful… they’re in fact trying to be a good friend, or lover, and they’re trying to persuade themselves that they’re interested… when they’re really not. An easy way to plot this scene might be to write a character who’s gay, who’s pretending to themselves that they’re straight, and in love with their partner, and they really want it to be real, but deep down it’s not. And when trying to explain it, they don’t need to tell a single lie. They can talk about how they had a great experience, and how wonderful it would be if everything worked out, and so on. Lying by omission.

One of the funny, interesting things that my wife does differently than me is that she tends to assume that people are very purposeful in their actions and inactions. She’d pointedly ask things like “why is <that person> doing <that unwise thing>?”. As a person with a history of doing unwise things, or not doing wise things, or generally blundering around, I’ve never particularly felt like I needed reasons. And similarly I don’t really feel like I need explanations for other people’s behaviors, too, at least not to the same degree that my wife does. There’s a lot of nuance here that’s hard to put into words. I think I wrote in a previous post recently about how I worry that a bad or imperfect explanation might be misconstrued as the total truth of some matter, and as a result I can be very hesitant to give an answer to something.

Like suppose someone asked me “why do you write?” Well. It’s a tough question to answer. How much time do you have? If I have only one tweet to answer the question, I might say something like “I write because I love words”. Which is the truth, and it feels to me like possibly the most important truth. George Orwell wrote an essay titled “Why I Write” in 1946, which is about 2,700 words long. Of this he spends the first 1000 words talking about his backstory, because— “I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development”— before he lists out “Sheer egoism”, “Aesthetic enthusiasm”, “Historical impulse”, “Political purpose”, elaborating on each. I revisit this essay periodically to compare my own feelings against it, and for the most part I think he really did a great job covering all the bases. I’m not sure what I might list as a 5th. Maybe “the desire to connect with a true friend”, which Montaigne did a lovely job of describing:

“Besides this profit that I derive from writing about myself, I hope for this other advantage, that if my humors happen to please and suit some worthy man before I die, he will try to meet me. I give him a big advantage in ground covered; for all that long acquaintance and familiarity could have gained him in several years, he can see in three days in this record, and more surely and exactly.”

I could go on and on. I’m reminded of another quote from somewhere else, the source of which I doubt I’d be able to find, something like… ‘the only person who might be able to speak the whole truth of anything would have to be God, and it would take him all of time and all the world to speak it.’ I think there’s something true in that, whether or not you believe in God– you could express it in secular terms, something about entropy and irreducible complexity and so on. To really completely know something inside out, you need to understand it in relation to everything else, which leads to “you need to know everything to know anything”. Which is a fun spin on why wise ol’ Socrates said “the only thing that I know is that I know nothing”.

Practically speaking though, obviously we do know things. We just don’t know anything absolutely. But we almost never need to know anything absolutely. We just need to know things well enough in order to suit our purposes. And here a fixation with abstractions and absolutes can actually distract someone from the practical knowledge they actually need in order to address their problems.¹ Also, obviously some people know things better than other people, in a way that has important practical consequences. That’s why we have experts and specialists who we can hire to solve our problems for us, though there’s also always the meta-problem of how do you know which specialists to trust, considering that con-men do exist?

There’s probably entire essays to be written about that, and I’m not sure that’s really what I wanna get into here and now. I’d like to begin wrapping up this essay before I go to bed, and to satisfy my own inner threshold guardian (the guy in my head who stops me from hitting the Publish button until the post is Worthy), I think I have to dig into some truth(s) about myself and my process.

For starters, I think simply acknowledging that I have a threshold guardian is a useful thing. Is it perfectly true? I’m not sure. I’m gesturing at something that might be perhaps a neurological complex. I’d say my threshold guardian is real-to-me roughly the same way that Santa Claus is real. Having some concept of him is more useful than not having a concept of him, even if the concept is nebulous. Maybe it’s a her? I haven’t examined them that closely. They are, after all, somewhat scary.

Earlier I talked about lying by omission, and I felt some part of me sorta flinch or wince internally, I think because it recognized that there might be some of that going on here. I mean, isn’t it always true that almost everybody is almost always “lying by omission” in some sense, considering, again, that Only God Can Say Everything? Yes, but that’s another absolutist statement, which isn’t very helpful. In ordinary practical terms, some omissions are more significant than others. The way how some silences are more tense than others. But properly appreciating this requires a sensitivity to context. A thing I wanted to say somewhere else is– even if Only God Can Say Everything, it turns out that ordinary humans can sometimes say a tremendous amount in a remarkably small amount of space. One of my favorite poems which I have committed to memory is Kobayashi Issa’s haiku,

in this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers

it’s just a few words, but it stirs so much in me. That’s the magic of art, the magic of communication. It’s not a one-way thing. You don’t have to say everything to make good art. You just have to say what is true to you, and there’s an act of trust here– you have to trust that it will resonate with the people who need to hear it. I could go on and on about the magical mystery of how art seems to transcend the bandwidth limitations of communication… we feel more than we know, and we know more than we can say. Yet occasionally someone says something that bypasses all of that, striking at the heart of our feelings, and triggers this cascade of truth-feeling that itself can feel transcendent.

Anyway. What am I lying² to myself via omission, internally? (You see how tricksy this stuff is; I believe that this is what ‘shadow work’ is like, it always squirms and tries to change the subject.³) I’ll try out a few phrases and ideas and see what resonates. Is it something about writing? Is it something about my home? Messes? My priorities? My relationships? All of that feels partially-true. I feel like there’s some kind of order hiding in plain sight underneath all the disorder, waiting for me to simply tap into it. I know from experience that I’ve done this before. Figuring out the phrase “Friendly Ambitious Nerd” was almost like uttering a magic spell, almost instantly so much of my scattered, disparate writings began to cohere around it, kinda like one of those science experiments with the crystals forming out of a solution. Believing in magic can be an irresponsible thing to do if it leads you to disengage from your material responsibilities– but if you’re a responsible person trying to get meaningful work done, and there’s a real possibility that something wonderful could happen and make everything tremendously better, it’s worth making a little space for, isn’t it?

Something is missing, something is hiding in plain sight, I can’t really go ‘looking’ for it with my ‘present configuration’, I almost have to ‘use the force’ and ‘just feel it’. Language here gets ~woo-y pretty quick, I think because non-wooey language is ‘conceptualized’, and the task at hand here is ‘preconceptual’. Aldus Huxley talked about a bunch of this stuff in Doors of Perception (1954). I keep looking for stuff to say that isn’t the thing. Hahahaha. What’s the thing, Visa?? I’m going to switch up to an even sloppier style of writing so that it flows faster:

Well okay if you really must know I guess the question is why am I still sitting with all of my current problems, instead of having already solved a bunch of them and moved on to newer more interesting problems? why am I sitting on a bunch of essay drafts and notes that i haven’t published yet? why have i not tidied up the room i’ve been meaning to tidy up, why have i not refreshed my bookshelves? why do i approach cleaning up my notes so painfully incrementally instead of taking big bold actions? i spent such an agonizingly long time trying to reduce 700 notes to 600, what was up with that? why can’t i just reduce it to maybe 50-100 in a day? … ah a lot of it is grief isn’t it. grief at the loss of old diaries, old journals, old blogs, old material that was so meaningful to me. i have a substack draft about this written separately that’s unfinished and i dont really feel like finishing it. i’m afraid of making big moves. i’m afraid of fucking up a good thing. and actually if i’m being honest i think there’s been a part of me that has just been kinda grumpy and annoyed at the very idea of making any sort of progress at all. like why should i have to do anything? i dont wanna!! i don’t wanna take risks and make mistakes and feel incompetent and deal with failure!!! i know that that’s the only way you ever make anything good or enjoy any of the really good things in life but the grump in me does not like that about reality!!!! and that part of me is grumpy that i dont even feel like i get to be grumpy!!!!! yea lots of things are good but some things suck and i start to go a little crazy not acknowledging when things suck!!!!!! wewww… ok.⁴

do i feel better? somewhat, maybe. the real measure is not how i feel right now, but what i write tomorrow, and the day after. i dont have to post this emo dump, it feels kinda sweaty and gross, i could just delete it or save it to drafts and then write something more polished and pristine tomorrow. but while i do kinda fantasize about the idea of writing polished and pristine things and getting praised for how perfect my writing is, the deeper truth is that I just want to do writing that feels honest.⁵

1. I call this Advanced Stupid, which I’ve been meaning to write an essay about for years now. One day I will find the right way to do it…

2. Maybe “lying” is a little too loaded a word for this particular thought experiment to be useful. I’m reminding myself to be a little silly about it. The essence here is more “funhouse mirror distortions” than like, “hiding lying in court”. I’m not on trial here, I have to remind myself, because so much of my childhood experience very much did feel like I was on trial, with seemingly devastating consequences, and I lived in so much fear and anxiety, some of which continues to echo to this day, in my adult body and mind, leaving me like an elephant tied to a post that it could probably easily pull out if it gave a tug.

3. Here I’d pause and say, okay, maybe explicitly looking for the omission might not be the right move, because it might be like– Alan Watts described a version of this as, the cops coming to raid a gang hideout with sirens blaring, such that the gang knows to hide ahead of time. I do have to concede the possibility that I won’t find an answer within the writing of this essay. Not every attempt succeeds at achieving its stated goal, though the important thing I’ve been trying to rediscover and embody is that you can still achieve other interesting things in ‘failed’ attempts.

4. lol i went back and added more exclamation marks after each sentence to really… emphasize the thing. and i felt it more strongly as i was adding it. it additionally feels silly and embarrassing that it seems like i just needed to vent and express some feelings. and it still remains unclear if any of that was actually ‘necessary’, but i’m doing it anyway

5. this is the correct place to end the essay, after which i came up with the title “if i’m being honest with myself”, and i feel like i ought to answer that question too. if i’m being honest with myself… what? i’m tired of myself? yes. I’m bored of myself? yes. what am i going to do about it? write my ass off, honestly. if i’m honest with myself i’m tired and bored and i’m going to fucken write my way out of it because that’s what i do. the next line that came to me after i wrote this is “i wanna be somewhere new already”, which reminds me of everything i’ve read and written about rushing. it’s a kind of anxiety. i have to face the present, face the now, be where i am fully in order to get to where i want to go. i do feel like this is broadly correct, and this is part of the thing that i’m omitting. there might be something deeper underneath it, but i’m just going to post it for now and leave the rest to tomorrow-Visa