I have two voices which, to me, sound authentically like my own. One is the voice I use here, but not when I publish with a specific audience in mind: once I know who I’m trying to reach, my voice becomes a product of sorts, intended to grease the route from my mind to theirs till the passage is as slick as can possibly be. Writing here, though, feels more like a conversation, with an imagined stranger who is precisely as patient with me as I have things to say, and will not wait a second more.
Sometimes, when I write to myself, my voice maintains this general cadence. That’s the case when I find myself trying to form a thought, and get the shape of it as whole as it can be.
My other voice is more private, and more personal. It’s the voice I use when I’m writing for me and only me. This voice is more staccato, almost Impressionist in its use of flicks and specks, at once meticulously structured and lazy with its overlaps and repetitions. It’s the sound of me remembering all the little Lego bricks, and not caring much for each one apart from making sure that they’re in place.
I think it’s ordinary to fret about the “real” you, about where the performance (or mask) of you ends and the sincere thing resting underneath begins. It’s normal to stress about the Self, and modern life more-or-less demands that we do, as we play ourselves digitally and publicly without reprieve, under the watchful eyes of hundreds or thousands. But the line between real and artificial is complicated—and complicated, I think, on two sides, only one of which we consider frequently.
On the one hand, we are always defined by circumstance, much like a fluid poured into a container. We can try to change our environs or move from one to another, but ultimately we succumb to the rhythms of the world: sensations and actions and emotions thump through us, soaking us through to our bones, until it becomes impossible to keep ourselves separate from our surroundings. Falling in love and screaming at a stressful situation work much the same way: the nature of our vessels may shift a bit from person to person, but in the end we are all lenses in a sense, refractions of the same light.
The trickier bit is that we are not, strictly speaking, ourselves. Our self-awareness, our consciousness, is a function of us reacting to ourselves, as if perpetually startled by our own existence. Our internal sensations strike us more immediately and drastically than anything else, so much so that it’s hard to escape the “I”; the closest we come, usually, is to fixate on how the “I” reacts to what it’s taking in. Many people meditate in the hopes of blotting out the world to fixate on the “I”; done properly, however, meditation comes much closer to an attempt to pull away from the “I” to fixate on the world.
If you can escape your own reaction, for a moment, you can start to see yourself as the world, as an integral part of it, as ordinary as the rest of it—and you can start to try and see yourself as others might see you, rather than how you think they see you. The latter is magnified irrationally, an overinflated balloon crowding out the sky, and it takes in the world’s reactions as if they’re a carpet of would-be needles, an endless judgment and analysis and surveillance all in one. The former is as large as any other person is—and, more, as large as other people are to you, which is to say that others largely see you as a dismissible whisper swirling around their balloon, by and large, indistinguishable from most breezes.
We are told that most of us fear being insignificant, but, in my experience, far more people fear their own significance. Being allowed to matter less lets them step back and take a deep, needed breath. And it’s less imprisoning than you’d think, because when you shrink yourself a little you realize just how vast the world is, just how much of it is open space, just how few immutable structures there truly are, and just how little the most imposing forces in our lives care directly about us—for worse but also for better.
Through this lens, the gap between the public and the personal self begins to blur, but for the opposite reason that we might usually credit. It’s not that you are more authentic than you thought—it’s that what you thought of as “your” authenticity is itself a performance, a front you’ve been putting on for yourself. In the end, you are the lens which warps the world; your substance isn’t quite internal, a hidden self, as it is the manner by which you embody the world, and in doing so change it. That’s as true of how you distort yourself, how you respond to your own responses, as it is of how you distort the outside world as you perceive it. What’s going on inside you is far more similar to what’s going on outside you, in other words, than you typically believe. You are not that core within so much as you’re a membrane between “in” and “out”, the point at the center of the infinity loop, the place where one side of the Möbius strip meets the other.
All of which is to say that I don’t feel any shift when I go from writing here to writing more privately—and that I don’t feel inauthentic when my more public writing transforms to match its audience as much as myself, if not more so. Expression is negotiation: what form it takes is dependent on the translation you’re attempting, whether it’s from you to someone else, or you to a group, or just you to yourself.
The psychosis we feel when we’re constantly put on display, I feel, is not just that we’re asked to perform for others. It is just as much our inability to separate the performance of us from the real us, our inability to distinguish between the ways that people react to us in various states. The public you that they respond to is not the personal you, just as different public responses are invariably to different yous. What changes isn’t that we change ourselves to suit the crowd, in other words—it’s that the crowd changes to suit “us”. They are as dependent on us as we are on them, and when they change, it’s because we’ve changed also. When you understand that, the shift from one space to another feels far less like a meaningful shift of you. All that’s changed is the world, which we continue to contain and reflect.
Given this, what concerns me most about our digital world of constant access is what happens when the context between spaces is lost. We’re bad at saying no to information, in the same way that eyes are bad at saying no to light. Yet the more of it we take in, the less it means. We make so much of ourselves available that we risk being seen less, as the ocean of us overwhelms anything resembling dry land.
To the extent that I am private, it’s because I know that what I disclose about myself stops belonging to me. It becomes a part of the world, a part of the entity called “Rory” that I co-write with whomever chooses to take me in. At first, I might have more of a share of myself than others, but the more people take me in, the less of myself I write—and it would be shockingly easy for one of those people to step in and write more of my character than they think is possible, should they so choose. The more a public figure is public, the more the public defines them, not them.
I understand this fairly well and don’t take the public character of myself too seriously. It’s not me, except to people who don’t know me. (The people in my life know better than to care about it much.) But I do try and keep more delicate things personal, because they’re tender enough as-is without an audience weighing in.
A man I looked up to at 18 kept a public blog with his then-girlfriend; major publications covered the blog like it was news. When they broke up, implausibly, they kept blogging the break-up separately but in the same public space, until the blog began responding to itself, a cycle of torment and anxiety fueled by the awareness that, whatever the other half of it said, the entire world would take in.
Curiously, while I’ve written my fair share of controversial pieces, I’ve found that the people who actively hate me, who seem to reserve time in their days for despising whatever I’ve done, are angriest when I share personal little tidbits, genuine details about my life as I live it offline. The tiny tender bits about nieces or neighbors or nearby parks or are what-have-you. What is the point of you including this? they seem to snarl. What does this have to do with the version of yourself that I’ve decided you are giving me?
The curious thing of it is, I think they have a point!
Sometimes, when I write to myself, my voice maintains this general cadence. That’s the case when I find myself trying to form a thought, and get the shape of it as whole as it can be.
My other voice is more private, and more personal. It’s the voice I use when I’m writing for me and only me. This voice is more staccato, almost Impressionist in its use of flicks and specks, at once meticulously structured and lazy with its overlaps and repetitions. It’s the sound of me remembering all the little Lego bricks, and not caring much for each one apart from making sure that they’re in place.
I think it’s ordinary to fret about the “real” you, about where the performance (or mask) of you ends and the sincere thing resting underneath begins. It’s normal to stress about the Self, and modern life more-or-less demands that we do, as we play ourselves digitally and publicly without reprieve, under the watchful eyes of hundreds or thousands. But the line between real and artificial is complicated—and complicated, I think, on two sides, only one of which we consider frequently.
On the one hand, we are always defined by circumstance, much like a fluid poured into a container. We can try to change our environs or move from one to another, but ultimately we succumb to the rhythms of the world: sensations and actions and emotions thump through us, soaking us through to our bones, until it becomes impossible to keep ourselves separate from our surroundings. Falling in love and screaming at a stressful situation work much the same way: the nature of our vessels may shift a bit from person to person, but in the end we are all lenses in a sense, refractions of the same light.
The trickier bit is that we are not, strictly speaking, ourselves. Our self-awareness, our consciousness, is a function of us reacting to ourselves, as if perpetually startled by our own existence. Our internal sensations strike us more immediately and drastically than anything else, so much so that it’s hard to escape the “I”; the closest we come, usually, is to fixate on how the “I” reacts to what it’s taking in. Many people meditate in the hopes of blotting out the world to fixate on the “I”; done properly, however, meditation comes much closer to an attempt to pull away from the “I” to fixate on the world.
If you can escape your own reaction, for a moment, you can start to see yourself as the world, as an integral part of it, as ordinary as the rest of it—and you can start to try and see yourself as others might see you, rather than how you think they see you. The latter is magnified irrationally, an overinflated balloon crowding out the sky, and it takes in the world’s reactions as if they’re a carpet of would-be needles, an endless judgment and analysis and surveillance all in one. The former is as large as any other person is—and, more, as large as other people are to you, which is to say that others largely see you as a dismissible whisper swirling around their balloon, by and large, indistinguishable from most breezes.
We are told that most of us fear being insignificant, but, in my experience, far more people fear their own significance. Being allowed to matter less lets them step back and take a deep, needed breath. And it’s less imprisoning than you’d think, because when you shrink yourself a little you realize just how vast the world is, just how much of it is open space, just how few immutable structures there truly are, and just how little the most imposing forces in our lives care directly about us—for worse but also for better.
Through this lens, the gap between the public and the personal self begins to blur, but for the opposite reason that we might usually credit. It’s not that you are more authentic than you thought—it’s that what you thought of as “your” authenticity is itself a performance, a front you’ve been putting on for yourself. In the end, you are the lens which warps the world; your substance isn’t quite internal, a hidden self, as it is the manner by which you embody the world, and in doing so change it. That’s as true of how you distort yourself, how you respond to your own responses, as it is of how you distort the outside world as you perceive it. What’s going on inside you is far more similar to what’s going on outside you, in other words, than you typically believe. You are not that core within so much as you’re a membrane between “in” and “out”, the point at the center of the infinity loop, the place where one side of the Möbius strip meets the other.
All of which is to say that I don’t feel any shift when I go from writing here to writing more privately—and that I don’t feel inauthentic when my more public writing transforms to match its audience as much as myself, if not more so. Expression is negotiation: what form it takes is dependent on the translation you’re attempting, whether it’s from you to someone else, or you to a group, or just you to yourself.
The psychosis we feel when we’re constantly put on display, I feel, is not just that we’re asked to perform for others. It is just as much our inability to separate the performance of us from the real us, our inability to distinguish between the ways that people react to us in various states. The public you that they respond to is not the personal you, just as different public responses are invariably to different yous. What changes isn’t that we change ourselves to suit the crowd, in other words—it’s that the crowd changes to suit “us”. They are as dependent on us as we are on them, and when they change, it’s because we’ve changed also. When you understand that, the shift from one space to another feels far less like a meaningful shift of you. All that’s changed is the world, which we continue to contain and reflect.
Given this, what concerns me most about our digital world of constant access is what happens when the context between spaces is lost. We’re bad at saying no to information, in the same way that eyes are bad at saying no to light. Yet the more of it we take in, the less it means. We make so much of ourselves available that we risk being seen less, as the ocean of us overwhelms anything resembling dry land.
To the extent that I am private, it’s because I know that what I disclose about myself stops belonging to me. It becomes a part of the world, a part of the entity called “Rory” that I co-write with whomever chooses to take me in. At first, I might have more of a share of myself than others, but the more people take me in, the less of myself I write—and it would be shockingly easy for one of those people to step in and write more of my character than they think is possible, should they so choose. The more a public figure is public, the more the public defines them, not them.
I understand this fairly well and don’t take the public character of myself too seriously. It’s not me, except to people who don’t know me. (The people in my life know better than to care about it much.) But I do try and keep more delicate things personal, because they’re tender enough as-is without an audience weighing in.
A man I looked up to at 18 kept a public blog with his then-girlfriend; major publications covered the blog like it was news. When they broke up, implausibly, they kept blogging the break-up separately but in the same public space, until the blog began responding to itself, a cycle of torment and anxiety fueled by the awareness that, whatever the other half of it said, the entire world would take in.
Curiously, while I’ve written my fair share of controversial pieces, I’ve found that the people who actively hate me, who seem to reserve time in their days for despising whatever I’ve done, are angriest when I share personal little tidbits, genuine details about my life as I live it offline. The tiny tender bits about nieces or neighbors or nearby parks or are what-have-you. What is the point of you including this? they seem to snarl. What does this have to do with the version of yourself that I’ve decided you are giving me?
The curious thing of it is, I think they have a point!