Thorny
Tomorrow’s event:
Ontological Design Sessions: What is Ontological Design? w/ Daniel Fraga, Owen Cox, Cadell Last, Carl H. Smith, and Raven Connolly. December 29th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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December 28th, 2020
Why would anyone want to read my journals?
This is the question that is coming up for me. I read some of my earlier entries and I totally cringed. I just wanted to put my hand on my head and say: your ego is showing brah.
Ego is probably the wrong word here, as it is such a boring and overused word. Maybe it was my attempt to look cool, and a misplaced sense of importance, that made me cringe. It was like looking at an old photograph where you have a really bad haircut you thought was super cool at the time.
I was thinking of publishing all of these entries into a book. I have been delaying on that though. My current plan is to publish them after the one year anniversary, but I am having second thoughts now. I would rather just delete them all. I am kind of embarrassed frankly.
Perhaps distance is needed. Sometimes old photographs make you cringe because they are still too close in time. Give it a few more years and they start to seem cool again. This could also be about self-acceptance: that was me, that was my process, and that was needed, or at least there was a thought that it was needed.
As I mentioned to Arran, this journaling process has served as an individuation process. Some journals were more outrageous than others, and others were more sexual, romantic, vulnerable, etc. They all helped bring out a certain part of me, a part that was not previously brought forward in a public way.
These journals have been a mix of things for me, they have been part “therapeutic art” for the above reasons. They have also served as “philosophical art,” by giving me a space to sketch out ideas that I am working on, but otherwise not committed to. They also serve as a strange way for people to keep up-to-date with the spirit of The Stoa, which is deeply influenced by the spirit of its steward. It is like a daily spiritual business report from a CEO or something.
Doing all of this in the spectacle though is pretty strange. As mentioned previously, the honeymoon phase of this experiment is over: weirdos are reading these, people being uncharitable are reading these, and others who want what I cannot deliver are reading these. This is a minority of course, but a minority can become a tyranny if you let them.
I sense certain recent experiences have energetically thrown me into a space where I want to go private. I naively marched in the noosphere, balls to the wall truthful, and started to share my truth. This has seemed to inspire many, but once I started getting all this shitty stuff, and got an overall needy vibe coming my way, there was a desire to withdraw my truth.
Why do I want to share deeply personal content, knowing that people are just going to project their shit on me? Some people simply do not deserve to read these things, and projecting their shit is not helping them process whatever trauma they need to process. If anything, their projections are just keeping their trauma alive.
Some potential solutions ...
1) Stop journaling. Something does not feel alive about stopping, as I do find writing these rewarding and nourishing. I like privately journaling, but there is something about public journals that encourage me to make them polished for others to read, which forces me to put extra attention to them.
2) Keep journaling with adjustments. Knowing that weirdos and fools will be reading these will naturally make me hesitant in sharing things that can be used to harm me, but maybe there is a way to write from a high enough meta-level that still affords therapeutic and philosophical processing but masks personal details. I am doing this already, but maybe I need to do it more. These journals could become more poetic in nature as well, and make less sense in the propositional realm.
3) Make these journals private. This seems interesting. I would feel way more comfortable knowing who is reading these. I would have to tease a few things out in order to see how plausible this is.
4) Untether these journals from The Stoa. It was a sweet experiment, engaging in the Stoic journaling practice of “ta eis heauton,” while stewarding a place called The Stoa. There was something delicious about this combination, but neither thing has turned out to be about Stoicism proper.
Going dark on social media has provided a temporary relief for me with all of this, and I suppose the part of me that wants to come out now is my inner villain, which has not been fully expressed or integrated, nor does it feel too incompatible with anything I have written here before. This does feel like the right part to come out now. As Hannah, the editor of these journals, wrote to me after a previous entry:
Roses can be completely soft and open to the world because they have their thorns to protect them. Have your thorns, but have your flowers too. Otherwise, the thorns have only their own hardness to protect.
Yeah. Thorny Pete. Sounds fun. I know how to be thorny, and as Hannah alluded to, the trick is not to get too attached to the thorns. I have seen people get high on the power trip that being thorny can bring. I have experienced that before, and it is something to be watchful of.
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