Changing my relationship to writing
Truth be told, this is the first blog I've ever had. I've read so many other Bear bloggers mentioning how they've been blogging their whole lives. I never had the instinct.
One of the reasons I've never had a blog is that sitting with my writing is challenging. I have this debilitating condition where the moment I write something in earnest and send it out to the world, I become instantly embarrassed and want to delete it. It's a bit like that feeling you get when you're trying to fall asleep, but your brain overanalyzes about every interaction you had that day (and just makes up narratives!). I always wish I could take back or change what I said... Well, with written content on the internet, you can! And so I did. And I did it with everything. I would even delete tweets within an hour of posting because I couldn't handle the cringe I felt due to the vulnerability of sharing my thoughts in earnest.
Surely the cause of this "condition" is a mix of a couple of things. I was raised to be a "people pleaser", or what I now understand as codependent. Part of my experience as a people pleaser is trying so hard at the impossible task of anticipating other people's needs and essentially mind-reading: how are others perceiving me? I was so strongly conditioned to think this way that I never developed the ability to explore my own inner world. Instead of asking "What are my thoughts?", my default is "What are everyone's thoughts about me?" It's challenging to discover who you are when you only try to understand yourself through other people's eyes.
I'm 31 now, and codependency still whoops my ass every now and then. But I whoop codependency's ass from time to time, too.
Unironically, this tweet did more for me than many sessions of therapy.
I think my schooling also left me with pretty low self-worth. I was never a precocious student. I needed speech therapy, I never had great grades, and academics didn't come super naturally to me. On top of that, high school also left me with pretty low self-worth. I had a hard time in my junior and senior years. I came out to my parents, and it was rough. Because of this, I failed a couple of classes and almost couldn't graduate because of my grades. I thought I was stupid. At the time, I thought grades were the only reflection of intelligence (lol).
So, on top of my codependent conditioning, I felt stupid! What would I have to write about? But things started to change when I got to college. I really found my interest and hit my stride. After my undergraduate degree, I went on to get my master's. Then, I went on to get my PhD. Now I am a scientist and professor and, ironically, write for a living.
Writing academically has challenged my relationship to writing. Although academic writing is different, it can't be that different from other forms of writing. So, I have this newly awakened desire to explore more personal writing. And that has led me here. My first blog.
My goal with this blog is to change my relationship to my personal writing, and maybe in the process, continue to change some of these limiting beliefs.
I'm happy to be here on Bear blog!
Cheers.