I have long endeavored to not simply become better at writing, but to do it consistently. That’s proven difficult. Mine is a mind that struggles to do things consistently. This upsets me, but I’ve found that I can negotiate with myself…or, it may be more like playing tricks on myself to get things done.

Here’s my attempt to negotiate with myself. I’ve established a minimalist, pseudonymous place to write some thoughts.

Pseudonymous?

Yeah. I carefully use this word as I don’t expect to be anonymous. Given enough writing on here, I will become identifiable. I am sure eventually I will choose to share this with a loved one or someone I trust. While I will do my best to avoid revealing information about myself, I do not expect anonymity. You can already make some educated guesses about my background just from this writing alone.

My goal is just to be

unattributable

in the sense that readers will (hopefully) remain unaware of my demographic information.

Why?

In my day-to-day life, I struggle greatly with being perceived. This includes by myself. I experience a sense of a lack of identity; this sounds devastating, but it is not as severe as you may think. The best way I can summarize it is that, if asked how I experience myself, the answer is: I don’t. I don’t experience myself through categories of sex, ethnicity, nationality, anything. I can, of course, describe myself in such terms. I certainly do not contend that these are non-existent or useless things. I accept that we carve out these categories for ourselves and each other because our brains don’t really have a choice in the matter.

It’s for that reason I don’t hold it against anyone. I do this to others. I hate that I do it, and I try as hard as I can to do it as little as possible, but my brain just isn’t built for looking at the world neutrally. I have subconscious biases, and my brain acts upon the information it has access to in order to make reasonable decisions. Knowing this, I do my best to try to gain more experience and information to round out this strategy.

Summed up: I’m a hypocrite, but not intentionally so. I am doing the best I can with the hardware I have. Now that I’ve acknowledged this, I can continue.

I must say: being perceived is awful. You contain within yourself an inner world that is forever inaccessible to all you encounter, to varying degrees. A stranger, having possibly an overwhelming number of encounters with others throughout their day, in whatever capacity they do, cannot rationally spend the time necessary with everyone to gain a sense of who or what that person ultimately is; and, nobody could rationally demand that of them. It is understandable, then, that one must resort to categorizations of experiences with people of different characteristics in order to move swiftly throughout their life.

There come irrational endpoints to this behavior, obviously. Bigotry and crimes against humanity. I do not contend I experience these.

Rather, what I experience is a sense of loneliness and otherness, even amongst my own demographic. I do not behave or believe or do as people similarly to me do, nor to how people dissimilar to me may expect. Often, this improves when someone familiar to me gets to know me. It does not ever fully resolve, though. I suppose it cannot.

I am aware others of how others perceive me, and it doesn’t create an effect of the Imaginary Audience or self-esteem problems. It almost feels like abandonment. “You so readily reduce me to this?” Hence loneliness and otherness.

Right. I do accept I cannot change this, really. I am okay with that. So, one would naturally look to turn inward. I have done this.

The best way I can describe this experience, internally, is the following: mirrors are confusing. My own experienced stature, size, composition, appearance generally, does not align with how I actually appear. I largely do not recognize myself in mirrors. I know it is me, of course. But the image I see doesn’t look like me.

I think everybody struggles with having a body, I do not wish to claim I am alone in this. But I have found as I have discussed this with others that this doesn’t appear to be very common, what I am probably failing to describe. I wish I could remain just a mind, and experience others as minds.

And so…

My mind, as I mentioned, struggles to be consistent. I think a lot, though. I overthink, to be sure. This little blog, or whatever you want to call it, is therefore a way to negotiate. I want a place where I can put down my thoughts, and you, the reader, cannot as easily experience it through your own depiction of me. It is a calming picture, to me.

Who knows if I will stick to it. I hope to. I always have things to talk about, and I haven’t many others (and, for stretches of time not-so-infrequently, anyone at all) to talk about it with.

Chances are, unless I share this, nobody will ever even read any of this. I am satisfied with this. There is something just about knowing your words are visible that serve as greater motivation to put them out there.

We’ll see.