What's the Point?
My friend who shall remain nameless recently asked me what the point of this blog was, what I hoped to get out of it. She has a blog, she told me, several in fact, but writes them for herself, not for an audience. Why do I want readers? And more, why was so much of what I write so analytical, so theoretical? When do we get to see more of me? Get to see more of what’s under there, under all the lectures and frameworks?
I told her I would post an answer for her soon. And today, soon is now.
Luckily for me, less than a week in, I’ve already published a post that does most of the heavy lifting for me. In The Conversation, I discussed the role that conversation plays in the generation of truth, meaning and understanding, and how it can mitigate the pain from our ultimately futile desire to be understood. And that, right there, sums up the goals of the blog pretty well: to start new conversations and for me to be seen and better understood.
As for the first goal, the conversations do not have to take the form of a traditional dialogue, with bidirectional exchange, although I definitely welcome those as well. Just the act of writing for a reader followed by a reader engaging with and interpreting that writing is enough. It kicks off the inquiry, the active process, in both minds that leads both reader and writer closer to the truth.
In other words, I think the ideas shared here get new meaning from the sharing, and hopefully will become something more than they can be locked away inside me.
And for the second goal, the hope is that I can reveal some of myself through my writing, making clear the parts that are difficult to convey in other settings. And that my readers will take the time to examine what’s been offered up and try to see the person behind them.
So fine, that makes sense. But why then so impersonal? Why not go ahead and pull back the curtain and reveal what’s behind it? What’s going on with me? How do I feel?
One answer is: we will in good time. I’m still getting used to writing for other people and will be easing in to sharing more personal stuff over time. But another, perhaps more revealing answer (and that’s the point, right?) is that the analytical and theoretical posts are extremely personal.
To me, the way I think and try to make sense of the world feels very much like who I am. So all the theory and analysis, all the lectures and frameworks and models, are not just about what they purport to be about. They are also a means to reveal who I am by showing how my mind works, which connections I draw, which assumptions I accept and which I question, and which subjects I choose to spend my most valuable currency on.
I am a hyper-analytical creature, probably weirdly so, and much of my inner life is taken up by it. I’ll write more on this and other types of neurodiversity later because one of the things that fascinates me is how we can all operate as humans in this world, how we can share so much, how there can be such a thing as the human condition, when our experience of it, what we are doing (or think we are doing) on the inside, the way it feels to be us, can be so different.
One definition of consciousness is phenomenal consciousness, which says that something is conscious if and only if there is a way that it feels to be it. There is a way that it feels to be me, although you’ll have to take my word for it, and some of this is my attempt to express what that way is.
So that is the point. I care about the topics I’m writing about and I want people to get something out of it. But on another level, the blog is a giant sign that says: this is what goes on in here, this is who I am.
I know that I will not be fully understood, that readers won’t be able to assemble the full picture from the pieces, that some connections I hope for will turn out to be missed ones. But the point is to try.