Journaling
Hey everyone,
I hope you are doing well.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Psychotechnology Playground w/ Bonnitta Roy Every Friday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Earth Regeneration w/ Joe Brewer. May 29th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly Every Friday @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Dark Stoa w/ Pat Ryan. Every Friday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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May 28, 2020
I had a conversation with Davood this morning and the topic of these journals came up. When I get too meta about an activity, and too self-aware, I start to question why I am engaging in the first place.
Why am I writing?
I will continue in the spirit of forthrightness, and I will risk sounding like a word salad again, and I will also write in such a way with the possibility that this could be my last entry. Because it could be my last entry. After today’s epistolary exploration, I might no longer desire to write. If the daemon stops telling me to write, I will stop writing.
On the surface, my professed reason—or maybe the propositional pretense—for writing is that I am engaging in a Stoic practice of writing to oneself. This was inspired by Marcus Aurelius. The idea is that writing to myself is a psychotechnology that helps with self-transformation. Has it though?
I am leaning towards yes. I have been journaling to myself for years now. Partly inspired by the morning pages exercise from The Artist Way, and partly inspired by the spirit of my philosophical conversations with Andrew. My journals were always private, and I deleted them after each entry. I always wrote with absolute rawness, and I was writing for one reason: to make the truth bleed out.
I have well over 10,000 hours of writing to myself in this way, and I sense this was not only my favorite, but the most transformational practice I had. I was hunting for the intrapersonal truths that were hiding. I had various techniques.
Sometimes I gadflied myself, and engaged in the socratic method with myself. Sometimes I engaged in an active imagination practice, where I pitted certain subpersonalities against each other, so they could negotiate with one another. Sometimes I practiced my coinage game, and invented new concepts in order to help understand myself and the world better.
Knowing that each entry would be deleted, I did not care about spelling, grammar, accidental plagiarism, or signalling anything to anyone. It was a private dialogue with myself, and all the various voices and energies that I contain. It was a safe space to be brutal, to be messy, and radically truthful.
I have now taken this private practice public. While there are similarities to my private journaling, there are also obvious differences. For one, there is now a record of my entries, as I am not deleting them right after I write. I also know that my writing will have other people's eyes on it, and I know who a lot of those people are.
This is encouraging me to write as beautifully as I can, which is probably not that beautiful, but as long as it is beautiful enough for me, that is good enough for me. I think this will help to screen out people, and help me find the others. If somebody shares my sense of beauty, then I sense they will be my people.
Writing these is also an exercise of being raw in public, and truthful in ways that are uncomfortable. The feedback I am receiving is that it is inspiring others to be truthful in public as well. When you become radically truthful, in a wild sort of way, especially in public, you risk appearing and being logically inconsistent. This is fun and feels adventurous, because like an epistemic cowboy, you dangerously ride towards the truth.
Lastly, I experience joy writing these. My journal writing, which I usually do first thing in the morning, has become my favorite activity. I do give it my all here, and I earnestly attempt to create something beautiful each time. And that is beautiful enough for me.
I think doubt crept in after my conversation with Davood, because he conveyed he thought I was becoming narcissistic. As I mentioned in previous entries, I think this is a risk, and I have meta-awareness of this, but meta-awareness is not enough. Meta-awareness can be co-opted by the narcissistic impulse.
To make matters more difficult, or more interesting, I am hyper self-aware of interpersonal dynamics. I am studied and practiced in them. I supported myself teaching interpersonal skills workshops and courses at both the University of Toronto and Dale Carnegie Training, the latter of which is the gold standard for winning friends and influencing people.
In essence, I have great sensitivities for impression management, and I sense I know how to manage my impression. This impression management skill-set is tethered to a desire to create a favorable impression. But I do not want to be too obvious about it, as I do not want to come across as manipulative.
So I ended up settling on trying to appear attractive, but not too attractive. Intelligent, but not too intelligent. Likable, but not too likable. Charming, but not too charming. Funny, but not too funny. Authentic, but not too authentic.
To be clear, I do not know if I am successful at this interpersonal median, and ultimately I do not know how skilled I am at interpersonal skills. Unbeknownst to me I could actually suck at it and rub people the wrong way. I can tell you that my initial desire to learn all of this stuff came from a place of not feeling inherently lovable, and having a phase of not having any friends, and being deeply lonely.
Being a kid and not having friends, and having the whole school beat me up—which did happen to me—may have conditioned me not to trust people, and I imagine it made me want to have a social guarantee.
I do not feel like I am a bad guy. I am just a guy that wants to have a friend, and I just want to be loved.
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