you are not the narrator, please stop
the observer effect could really make you self censor huh. on the other hand — or not?
I have not, not, written about my personal life at length in a second. No one who kept up with my blog from 2012-2018 knows who I’m dating, what I’m working as, who my best friends are. This was intentional but unconscious.
This has been the case for a few years.
Why did I stop? Why did I decide to just omit a part of my life from the record? Why did I only choose to appear randomly on the scene every few months for a very short but non-revealing look at a concept I had jotted down briefly the night before?
On the one hand, it was because I was busy. I was also trying to live my life as a main character.
What did I lose out on with this? What was I doing before?
Well, before… before I was trying to live life as an observer of things that were happening in real time. And being hands off about actually identifying with what was happening to me as something I had agency with.
Thus I began trying to stop living in my head, stop constructing whatever realities I had in my head in the outside world.
This is a PSA — to every writer out there who might be suspending reality to be the narrator. To disassociate from themselves as the main character to be omniscient. YOU WILL FAIL.
Anyways, if you want me to be absolutely real about how I know this:
I started blogging about my crushes in college, as someone who felt really invisible. I thought no one would notice such posts. I thought the situations were over and I could gain peace by writing about these guys. I would just wax poetic about the “tragedy” of them.
It left me wrecked hardcore… because guess what? THEY WERE READING THE WHOLE TIME. The situation was not as resolved as I thought.
They were looking for signs I still liked them, or something. And they got mad, mad at me, for rejecting them, for not seeing shit accurately. Whether or not this was justified, doesn’t matter.
The point is that I was so busy narrating who I was, that I never stopped to realize who I’d become. A highly efficient basket case that didn’t take responsibility for impacting a situation because I was busy observing it.
And then my writing fundamentally altered the situation.
Which brings me to the point of this post — something to keep in mind, in our society today, is you do not exist in a vacuum. Remember you are not the narrator. You cannot see everything, nor can you engage with everything with no consequences. Writing about it from this vantage point of non-application is highly tempting. Be on guard to what you do not realize you are impacting.
By trying to know everything, often you know nothing. You are a human. You cannot try to pattern match everything about your life without getting out there.
YOU CANNOT CONTROL EVERYTHING, DEAR READER.
If you’re the specific person who’s a bit admittedly naval-gazey, and you’re running your mouth sharing very public, very intimate details about people you’re seeing, and you are not doing a great job of keeping the line between reality and historical fiction nice and sharp — by god, I beg of you, do be careful out there.
For you haven’t realized: often, to be a writer you must suspend your reality, AND reality will still continue even if you exclude yourself from it.
Ironically, by disassociating to being outside it, you are not “in the flow” of reality. You thus cannot control it, because it’s scary.
So, AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, live life as if you’re not the narrator.
For most of the time — you are not.
*****
So what do you do when you’re a personal essayist and you’re tasked with writing about something *hard* and you write about it… and… it has lasting consequences?
People don’t see this right away. But it happens all the time, even if most of us who are writing essays are sort of in a state of resignation, or contemplation, about slow-burn, relatively static situations in our life.
That’s the counterargument here. People will try to claim, well, not all essays suspend reality because sometimes something you’re writing about is set in stone (someone died, you moved cities, etc.). To which I say — yes, to an extent. But often, to write about something, you have to assume prematurely that it is static. Otherwise, how can you capture it?
How can a painter properly paint a still life of an object in motion?
When you think of personal writing, you think about stuff where it’s clear where reality lies (to a degree). The concrete lived experience isn’t morphing before your eyes. Maybe we’re grappling with immediately leaving a job, a breakup that just happened, or realizing college/time in X city is over and what that means. Or we’re looking back at our lives, with the “history is made in retrospect” sort of frame, and musing on things. We’re either looking forward, or looking back.
Now picture active combat.
Now remember how much in your life might be in a radioactive state.
Now think about… what do you do when life might be in a radioactive state and writing about it could shift the dial?
Examples shouldn’t be hard to come by, but let’s examine two:
You’re wanting to quit your job, but talking about it would surely lead to your firing
Damn, that would be quite a debacle. Imagine literally desiring to warn people about X phenomenon in X industry that’s really toxic, but you can’t go public, and there’s no credibility. What do you do? Most people do nothing. But some of the people with the most mind-blowing insight about corporate culture and establishment stuff don’t get to talk about it til after they leave.
Then they’re in a time capsule — their knowledge is only good as it was at the time of leaving. After that, it will slowly start decaying in relevance. People in the field playing the game now know the most. But their minds remain unmined for information.
They literally cannot suspend reality in the name of writing about it, even if they wanted to.
Talking about a job after it’s over is different than being able to document the delusion that came with it in real time, so people can see it for themselves.
You want to cheat on your partner and write an essay about it, but if they found your essay, they’d find you private thoughts and then the relationship would end.
It doesn’t matter whether you’d *want* them to know your inner world or not, the point is that they would see such a thing and it would fundamentally alter the situation. Reflecting on the weird chaos of this situation, lamenting it, processing it — if you do that through writing but also have this paradoxical human urge to let others know about it, you risk the other seeing and finding out.
At that point, is it worth it to tell them?
I can’t imagine any time where talking candidly about the demise of your relationship to the public would literally do anything but detonate it further. And yet, people do this all the time!
it’s as if they forget the observer effect is fundamentally a part of our lives — or do they forget? Is it that maybe they just don’t care anymore? Because they’re so desperate to communicate certain things, and can’t, that writing about it is the only way to do so?
This logic applies to having a fight with a friend or about to go through a divorce.
If you write about it and they find it, it fundamentally dictates what the next thing you’ll write about is. (possibly real heartbreak).
And I make the case, again, that you cannot live in a vacuum as a writer. You cannot escape healing as a writer. This tool should add to your life and your experiences, but it should not be a way to escape and live in a vacuum. Don’t be surprised when your writing effects real change — for better or for worse. I think the best writers can prepare for this potential impact without burning themselves out over it.
Please for the love of god, don’t keep being a narrator, a passive observer of trains coming back and forth at the station.
Be the observed one. Be an active agent. Discern what you’re going to talk about, what you’re not going to talk about, what you’ll be fearless about, what you’ll retreat from. All with intention and awareness of the world you occupy existing with the world in your head. Let reality coalesce.
Let who you are change others fundamentally — even without your pen.
Epilogue — what to do about it?
In other words, more to come soon!