At any given time, I have many open word documents. I must confess I don’t restart my laptop very often, and when I do so, I generally have to name three, four, five documents, and save them in the ‘unpublished’ folder of my Substack folder. Maybe I should rename it the “junkyard” or the “Cemetery”.
Memories of me writing go back to elementary school, but more so around 14 when my mental health started to go awry. Everything would be very dark and hopeless, and even self-hating sometimes. As years went by, I grew up, went on with performing my life and my writing went on and off through blogs and secret documents, to completely inexistent, to a brief comeback, to nothing again.
After giving birth to my first child, I started a blog, and wrote a lot for years. What I enjoyed was being read, or at least the possibility of it. People around me were asking why I wanted so bad to be read, and I couldn’t really answer, because the truth was embarrassing. Go back in 2009, social media was not the first iteration of information, you’d really have to look up for something, and know what to look for and where, to actually find it. As a relatively prude person, I don’t thrive on meaningless attention, or easy attention. Posting pictures of myself to be given compliments has never been ‘my’ thing. I tried it, because it was a thing to do, but it faded quickly. Changing profile picture just to be told you’re pretty, ugh… no thank you. My best years are long gone, and I don’t need to be comforted in my appearance by strangers… However, being read is for me the perfect form of exhibitionism.
As an either very smart or completely dumb person, I never know as the days go, I like the idea of being smart, of being funny, of having some power through my words. Because I find people either very smart or completely dumb (it’s a theme), writing seems like the perfect way to choose who you get to reach, without being completely disappointed. Reading requires intellectual effort, and this kind of effort is one form of intelligence. By writing and making it public, I can show my most intimate self, and only a few will access it because they are ‘worth it'. Isn’t the best form of exhibitionism?
This is exactly where exhibitionism and disappointment collapse. In the sea of writers, everyone is a writer now, and because I don’t want to please, I don’t get to exhibit as I used to in this already saturated market. “Good for you”, you shall say. Who am I to require that others participate in my fantasies of being read? That’s the point. I am nobody. And forcing others into my own fantasies is way too much of a hot trend right now, and I don’t follow trends.
If I went to places of conflict and drama, if I dared to embark on polarized topics I have no expertise on, maybe I could attract people. But who would these readers be, and how long before I could get trashed? I have opinions and very strong ones on very popular issues, as well as political and social trends. There is a long post in my ‘unpublished’ folder about my “Kill the Kardashian” tee-shirt, why I bought it and why I consider it so important. But in the end, I couldn’t really know who this would interest, probably the wrong crowd. My idea is good, but it has no social worth.
As I grow wiser and wiser, I realize that my opinion doesn’t matter that much, if at all, and that I am even more backwards in this society than I ever thought I was. In all forms of exhibitionism, the older you get, the less people want to see your junk, I suppose. There is it, this one seems good enough to go in the ‘Published’ folder.