Why does writing about myself feel so right, and also so wrong?
The pleasure-pain experience of sharing your feelings with the world
A little note: I started writing this post on Tuesday, and wanted to send it much earlier than today - I usually write quickly and get things out before I have a chance to change my mind. I don’t know if it’s the subject matter, or how much I felt I had to say, but this one has been an unweildy fucker, which I’ve almost given up on many times. The interesting thing is that the process I’m writing about has taken place multiple times today - all the feelings I’ve described (and probably more) have arisen. I had to laugh - the ridiculousness of writing about the anxious feelings that arise when I post something, nearly thwarted by the self same anxious feelings. The only reason I’ve not followed through and actually deleted it is because I’m stubborn, and because I can’t bear the idea of spending so much time on something only to get rid. Hopefully you’ll find the throughline I was hoping for in these ramblings.
Ever since I started this Substack, I’ve been wrestling with an internal push-pull about the content of my posts. Although I’m slowly coming to accept that this sort of writing - memoir, personal essay, whatever you want to call it - is what I enjoy doing most, I’m still struggling to let go of the sometimes nauseating feelings that arise for me when I share my internal world publicly. There’s the obvious reason - that it’s hard to do, but I think there’s other stuff going on too.
When I’m doing the actual work - the writing - words flow out of me with ease, and I feel confident and alive and full. So far, so good. Then I share my post, and I have maybe an hour or two of feeling pleased with myself. And then I crash and often fall into a deep shame spiral. In these states, it’s easy to convince myself that I’m a terrible writer and that I’m arrogant for even thinking that anyone might want to read my words (or worse still, take comfort from them). Either that, or it’s the “whiny and self-indulgent” voice that’s in the driver’s seat.
I’m not saying any of this to fish for compliments, but more to interrogate this very real pain point for me (and many others I know/follow) that goes beyond low self-esteem. Why, when writing feels like the most natural thing, is it so difficult to actually enact in public? Why am I so full up to the brim with love and respect and admiration for others who are doing the exact same thing as me, but so put off by my own version of it? Writing is a recognised, creative pursuit. It’s as valid as songwriting, or acting, or screenwriting, or dancing. I know this.
And yet there is something about it that feels harder. Even as I’ve accepted that personal writing is what I love to do more than most things in the world, I’ve often wished that I wanted to write fiction. Somehow, the imagined world of storytelling feels more acceptable than memoir. I love reading about others’ experiences, so why, when I write about my own, does it, by turns, feel so wrong, so icky, so uncomfortable?
I know a lot of this fear is my own stuff, which I’m working through, and I also know I’m definitely not alone in it, but I’ve also been thinking a lot about the power of cultural conditioning, especially for women, around being “too much.” Too many feelings, too much to say, all the while taking up too much space.
As a child, I wrote all the time. I was the annoying kid who was always asking for more paper in the classroom or exam hall. I’ve got countless notebooks full of stories, and I’ve been a prolific diarist since I was a young child, after receiving my first ‘Hello Kitty’ journal aged 5. As a kid, I’d enthusiastically share what I’d written with anyone who would listen, but my willingness to do so petered off as soon as I hit my teens and fell into that familiar hole of self-consciousness. I still claimed I wanted to be a writer, and studied English at college and university, but anything personal was reserved solely for the diaries.
Working at the University of Brighton in my twenties afforded me the opportunity to study for free, and so I did. I pushed down any desire to write creatively, and opted for the safe route, obtaining an MA and later, a PhD. The whole time I studied at postgrad level, I did well, but my supervisors had to wring what I actually thought out of me, like blood from a stone. “We need to hear more of your critical voice!” they’d say. Although I enjoyed the actual learning, the whole concept of academic writing left me cold. Alongside my inability to give enough of a shit to actually formulate an argument, I was routinely reprimanded for being too discursive: not concise enough, not tight enough, not focused enough.
Back in 2013, as we wandered around an ancient bluebell wood, my dear friend Alice and I had a conversation about wanting to write, and how terrifying we found the proposition to be. We made a pact - to set up a blog each and to write something and send it to each other once a week. We kept it going for a while, and then around the same time, we both stopped - I can’t remember why. At the time it fizzled out, I’d not shared the posts with anyone else other than Alice. Around the same time, I started another secret blog, this time for my short story ideas and responses to writing prompts. I think I managed three posts that time.
I remember being aware of my patterns - I even bought the book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway in an attempt to overcome my hesitancy - but in a hilarious (not really) continuation of normal service, I think I only read the first few chapters. I definetly didn’t finish it.
Later, when I moved to America, I resurrected my original blog. It functioned as a place for me to write about what we were experiencing, and to keep people up to date. I shared a bit more widely this time, but the circle was still small: only my closest friends and family. I kept it light, informative - more about what we were doing and what we’d seen and what was different - rather than my true feelings, which were often dislocated and homesick. After a consistent few months of posting (I set myself a New Year challenge of writing something daily), I got the flu on a flight home from Denver and I stopped and never started again.
Back in the UK and as the pandemic raged, I began studying Ayurveda via a year-long online course. I was so motivated by the new knowledge I was gaining, and so inspired by my creative classmates that I set up yet another WordPress. This time I wanted to document my learning journey and my insights as I went along - I figured it would be a good way to integrate the theory and reflect on all the downloads I was having each week. I posted it to my classmates via the regulation Facebook group and wrote 8 or 10 posts, but once again, I failed to share it more widely, and once again, it fell to the wayside. I can’t even remember why I stopped.
And now here we are, almost 4 years on, and I’ve been posting on Substack for almost a year. In light of my track record to date, this feels like progress!
It was during our time in America that the whispers about writing began to crystalise for me. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to start a novel a few times. My ideas book was full, but getting started was like pulling teeth. The experience of being away from home, of being in another country on the other hand, was so all-consuming that it expanded my journaling habit exponentially. I filled notebooks with scribbles about our experiences, our travels, my homesickness, and started to tentatively think about what I might do with it all.
I remember a 4th July trip to the Upper Peninsula that Karl and I took in 2019, our final year in Michigan. We had driven for hours on sand dirt roads, through deserted forests and strange grassy expanses, to set up camp at a site located at the mouth of a river that led directly to the lakeshore. We sat on our picnic table, cracked open a couple of beers, and started talking. Soon the conversation turned, as it often did, to our hopes and dreams and plans for the future. I remember speaking to Karl about my dream of writing; the way that I couldn’t seem to shake it off - how I’d tried to do other things, but that it always came back to me, nudging me: words asking to be written. It crossed my mind that I’d been writing about our experiences in America for four years and never shown Karl - my husband, my confidante, my biggest champion - any of it.
On a whim - I was tipsy and energised - I pulled up the notes app in my phone where I keep all my ideas and writing snippets, and I showed it to him. There were a few things in there I felt proud of, and the IPA had given me courage. He was sweet, kind and supportive. I felt elated, but on some level I also felt sick. I felt a shadow of shame rise in me, even as I celebrated my little breakthrough. We made dinner and went to watch the sunset, and the moment was soon forgotten, but the memory of those conflicted feelings I had is strong: the weird juxtaposition of absolute rightness, and certainty about my purpose, mixed with shame, embarrassment and a feeling of shrinking.
Despite these pervasive feelings, the mere fact that I even had a notes app filled with ideas was testament to what America had done for me. In so many ways, being in the US was a tonic for the shyer parts of my personality. It forced me out of my comfort zone in a way that nothing else has done to date. I worked at a contemporary music school, and was surrounded by creative people doing creative things, who were all (seemingly) fine with sharing their work with others, and who all (again, seemingly), were completely supportive of others doing the same.
When we first arrived, I felt it grate on me, felt my uncomfortableness, felt my judgement at the ‘attention seeking’ behaviour I believed I was witnessing. I remember, early on, one of the songwriting instructors coming into the office and asking us if we wanted to hear the song she’d just written. We all sat around, and she played it for us there and then on her guitar, sat at someone’s desk chair. I couldn’t believe my eyes - the audacity of her, the confidence! As our time went on, I observed that this ability to share seemed baked into the American psyche, regardless of any feelings of unworthiness that might exist below the surface. I had friends and colleagues and students who I knew had low self-esteem, or lacked confidence, but even if they were plagued by these feelings, it didn’t stop them sharing their creative work.
Fast-forward to our last year in Detroit, and the same songwriting instructor bounded back into the office, this time to show us the artwork for her new album. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, all I could think about was how proud she was, how hard she’d worked. I was filled with joy, both about her achievement, and about everyone around me: how kind, how encouraging they were. Their unwavering belief that it was ok - good, important - to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there in the world, even with no guarantee that people would like it.
These thoughts about America flashed across my mind when I started this Substack back in March. The call to write was getting louder; there was a sense of urgency driving me in a way that hadn’t been there before. Time was marching on, and in the gap where my dreams of a family had once resided, writing fell back in. I still didn’t feel comfortable sharing, but for me, it was enough that it was there. It felt like a seed; an intention.
The past 5 years have been tumultuous but have taught me so much. Another reason that my Substack project began to feel urgent is because I could no longer stomach the idea of keeping a part of me that was burning with things to say stuck in a box. It’s been in the box most of my life. Why? What am I afraid of? What others will think of me? This is a common fear for many, but I’m pretty sure I’m at the extreme end of the spectrum. Even typing those words feels a bit uncomfortable to me: that simply admitting I’m worried about what someone thinks of me, somehow smacks of ego or self-obsession.
I’m able to be kinder to those critical parts of myself than I used to be, but they’re still in there, telling the same old story. When I’m able to separate myself from them and respond with compassion, I’m often struck by the realisation that there’s been so much of my life that’s been governed by warped thinking. Why have I always thought the most important thing was to be agreeable and ‘nice’? What sort of life is that? Is it the life I want? Why do I think expressing my feelings makes me somehow not agreeable and nice?
Of course, being uncomfortable with my feelings is a very British quality, and it’s one that I’ve seen magnified following my return from the States. I realise that I’m making some quite sweeping generalisations about Brits and Americans, but there’s kernels of truth in both.
For example, in Britain it’s fine to be successful and to follow your dreams, but please don’t shout too loudly about it. You can be in a band, or you can be a writer, or good at sports, or an artist, but it’s imperative to always remain humble and thankful. Never “blow your own trumpet”, that’s frowned upon in the UK. As a rule, Brits deride cockiness and arrogance. Have you ever been asked if “chips aren’t good enough for you?” or been told not to get “too big for your boots.”?
The Brits love an underdog, love someone who started from nothing and became something, or those who overcame difficulty in pursuit of a dream, all the while remaining modest and unassuming. I was a big X-Factor fan back in the glory days and hung rapt on the words of those contestants with the longest ‘back story’ segment. They were always the ones who’d been through the most, who’d had the worst times but were coming back for their “last chance.”
When I think about my parent’s generation, I always think it must have something to do with the war. And it makes sense: after 1945 I’m sure most people were simply grateful to be alive. But the “Make do and Mend” and “Keep Calm and Carry On” motifs from that period run deep in British culture: feelings are bad, stoicism is good. Making a fuss is bad, ‘getting on with it’ is good. Drawing attention to yourself is bad, being discreet is good.
Things are shifting and changing, which is wonderful to see, but I think a lot of us millennials and Gen-Xers still carry the weight of this way of thinking in our DNA. Our parents were taught to sit on their emotions, to squash them down, and we learned to do the same. To abandon ourselves and our needs in favour of the greater good. By proxy, I think, many of us also learned to ignore our creative impulses, to silence the little voice telling us how we might express ourselves. All sacrificed at the altar of fitting in.
This attitude is insidious and as I got older, leaked out into all aspects of my life. I think of a time, at 13, when a friend and I met a group of boys from school in town one evening. We wandered around in that aimless way you do when you’re young. It was a damp, cold, autumn night. We climbed a fence to the local swimming pool, and I ended up with one of the boys in an outdoor changing room cubicle. Later, all crammed into a tent, with rain leaking through the seams, he put his hands into my pants. It hurt, and there was a voice in my head begging me to tell him to stop, asking me to stand up and leave, but I let him go ahead because that was what I was supposed to do to be liked, right? Because I didn’t want to make a scene. Because I didn’t know any better. Later, once I was back at home in my bedroom, I felt uneasy and wrong, but also strangely resigned. He ignored me at school on Monday.
A tiny part of me died then. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time I’d abandoned myself, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but it set a wonky direction in my inner compass. Over time, the inner voice that had my best interests at heart became quieter and quieter, and being “good” and working hard, and smiling and saying yes became bigger priorities.
The term ‘people pleasing’ wasn’t around when I was a teen, but is commonly recognised and understood now. There are so many ways that it manifests, but one of the most obvious is saying yes, when you really mean no. I’m well practiced at this one - and not always for upsetting reasons. Before we moved to Detroit, I existed in a social whirl, every moment of my life outside of work accounted for and filled with plans: lunches, brunches, meet-ups, pub trips, roast dinners, festivals, gigs, family gatherings. Later: hen parties, weddings, baby showers. No time off, ever. Never a spare moment.
There were so many wonderful times, and plenty of joy and connection. But there was also no balance. I never even thought to consider what I wanted, outside of my connection to others (which has always been, and remains one of the best things in my life). I was polite, I was nice, I was agreeable, I said yes when I meant no. I tied my worth as a human to my ability to show up for a job I cared little about, for an academic programme of study I knew wasn’t right for me, and for the people in my life. Then we moved to Detroit and my work life expanded but my social life shrank. We had a few wonderful friends, but I was faced with something I’d not had since childhood: time on my hands.
I will always love America for showing me that middle path. That it was possible to have a job I loved, and close friendships, and that it was also possible to make time for the things that filled me up that were just mine. I’d inhabited my body for 35 years, but I was about as far away from actually knowing myself as it was possible to be. A large part of my brain was perpetually connected to everyone else in my world and what they thought of me, and what they needed from me. I didn’t know what it meant to please myself.
Back in 2020, like many others, I stumbled across Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I’d not read much self-help at this point in my life, and it turned my world upside down: this idea that I didn’t have to be quiet, and people please, and that I had agency, that I could speak. But I remember also feeling a little bit - I don’t know - taken aback shall we say? Much like the songwriting teacher I encountered in Detroit, I was uncomfortable with the confidence on the page. Of how sure of herself she seemed.
Did I think she was “too much?” I might have done. I reasoned that my resistance was arising because I was miles away from being there myself, but there was also a part of me that just felt awkward. I imagined a boomer reading it - well actually no, they’d probably never read it - but if they did, I imagine they’d say she was “a bit full of herself.” Like being “too big for your boots,” no-one ever wants to be told that they’re full of themselves. Both expressions are so common in UK parlance, and I don’t think there’s much ambiguity about what they mean: arrogance, conceitedness, vanity, pretentiousness, superiority.
It’s this sort of stuff, I think, that has thwarted me again and again. I have been so desperate not to appear vain or arrogant, that I’ve put the brakes on writing, which is one of the things that I enjoy most in the world. How often do we all ignore that voice inside, telling us what we really want? How common is it to do things from a place of obligation and expectation, rather than listening to the whispers within?
I’d like to do away with these stereotypes and expressions that echo in my head and make me feel small. I wonder if it’s possible to put a new spin on them? What if being “full of yourself” simply meant feeling connected to yourself, to your body, to your heart? This option feels way less painful than the barrage of self-criticism that I contend with daily. And what’s so bad about blowing your own trumpet? (More to the point, whose trumpet are you supposed to blow if not your own?!) What about being too big for your boots? Could this mean little expression be transformed instead into a symbol of growth or expansion, like a force of nature? It feels nicer to think that as I learn more and care less, I can outgrow my old boots in favour of a new pair - one that can hold an expanded version of me - as opposed to an insult or reprimand.
The irony of all of this is that, like my pals on X-factor who’ve been through it (and are therefore worthy of taking up attention), it’s my recent struggles that have given me more confidence to step into my creativity. It partly comes from a sense of ‘fuck it:’ life feels too short, and so many shitty things have happened, so why should I pay mind to the thoughts of faceless people on the internet or those I used to go to school with? It’s also more present because I feel a deeper need to write: writing has always been a way for me to process, and on the rollercoaster that is currently my life, I need all the help I can get. I also leaned heavily on others’ writing when I was going through my own difficulties (and continue to do so), so there’s a part of me that wants to return the favour. It’s what everyone says: if what I write touches just one person positively, then it’s worth it.
Finally - well, why not? I’d prefer not to be controlled by these insidious perceptions anymore. It’s like when women stop shaving because, fuck the patriarchy. If I can get over myself and express myself creatively, however much it makes me cringe, then in my own tiny way, I’m sticking two fingers to all the programming that’s governed my life to date. It’s like when I go and jump in the freezing cold water: it’s so hard and it hurts a lot and I think about it a lot beforehand and worry how it’s going to be, but also once it’s done, it’s over, and I can say I’ve done it and that feels good.
The idea of removing the barriers that have always ruled me and my life: the shoulds and the musts and the obligations and the need to please, the need to achieve, the need to be productive, the need to stay small - it feels almost impossible. What a thought, that I might be able to live without these thoughts, or at least turn down their volume. What a thrilling idea that it’s actually ok to have an opinion, to take up this little sliver of space, to make myself vulnerable, to be seen.
I know from experience that it isn’t easy for us to change how we’ve operated in the world for the majority of our lives, but I do believe it’s possible. I’m not often one for ‘mind over matter’ but in my case, I think it might be required.
So here we go. Feeling the fear; doing it anyway.
