Does Authenticity Lead to Alienation?
Of learning what writing (and connecting with people through it) means to me.
The idea of fame terrifies me. Popularity is the result of an action we do or knowledge we share with others. For years, I suffered from the fear of public speaking as the action itself needs to be done at the expense of the possibility of being seen as ignorant. I have lost count on how many times I have told people that I am not great at oral interactions: I stutter an embarrassing amount of time because I physically cannot stomach the idea of not responding right away. A response is the testimony of our attention. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” Mary Oliver once wrote. There is nothing I offer better than my ears, thus making any of the people I communicate with think that I am indifferent to their stories would be something akin to a nightmare.
It is different when I exchange letters with my friends, or simply send each other texts via direct messages or chat rooms. When I text, I have the time to curate my words and do a bit of research, if necessary. Writing is a skill I still need to improve, yet it also has morphed into a significant medium for me to interact and to profess my compassion to people outside my private chat box. My admiration for human beings, my feelings, up to the hardships I went through are all communicated through writing. Sometimes, I would share them and would receive an overwhelming amount of feedback from friends that do not only reassure me to carry on, but also dare me to dream bigger.
It all started with my desire to blog ever since I was practically in junior high school. For a website which was operated by a fourteen year-old, I was able to update sporadically. It was also a platform for me to practice English; sputtering absolute nonsense about reflecting the choices I had made and the direction of my life. Feeling quite confident and was plagued by the silly thought that I needed to expand this skill, I entered a few writing competitions. A shopping coupon was the biggest prize I had won back in the day. My failures and embarrassment paid off as I reached high school when I actually won the first place in a prestigious poetry writing contest. Shortly after, a short story writing competition. In between those hustles, there were also debating competitions and weekly essay writing class.
Those experiences are not as complex nor grand as I make them to be, but they shaped me into who I am now. They molded my styles and methods of writing into something I could distinctively call mine. My heart fluttered when an old friend as well as a witness to my ancient and demonic Wattpad anthology of poems and proses asked me whether or not she could borrow the title I used for my story as a tagline for her business. I never agreed to something so fast in my entire life, I mean, a mortifying Wattpad poetry I wrote half a decade ago was being seen as a potentially good copywriting material? [Mia Thermopolis’s voice] Shut up!
More than anything, it was her polite gesture of asking for my permission that made me all teary-eyed.
"I’m in love with human beings, I want desperately to feel connected. Everything I do is for my love of, and yearning for, people. So, press outlets nonetheless insisting I’m ‘intensely private’ feels vindictive, like a punishment for setting boundaries, and for not offering more of myself for content and exploitation.”
— Mitski, from this interview.
I slowly learned what I wanted to become when I found out that I enjoyed the process of arranging letters into words, then words into a comprehensible sentence. Opportunities took me to several journalism clubs I have joined since junior high. Not only did I learn the art of writing, but I also came to realize the power words could hold. Keeping Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s “The Elements of Journalism” close to heart, I learned that neutrality in journalism is nothing but a myth. Subjectivity is inevitable because writers also carry their own interests while writing, which ideally favor minority and vulnerable groups. So, when I asked myself one night, “Does my authenticity in writing lead to the sense of alienation?” I was spiraling down an existential crisis.
On the campus press, we move as a community. Our existence is made of our released products which amplify the voices of the oppressed. We do not enter the market; profits do not drive our productivity. The communal work that we do feels like something that is for the greater good, which it is, and it is incredible to be a part of a group with the capacity to contribute something to our surrounding environment. A few forms of appreciation we could offer to the writers are friendship and points we collect from the amount of published writings they have made. Every six months, we would distribute one book for two press members with the highest points each.
However, when I write with the intention of sharing it with everyone as a form of self-actualization and so-called affection toward my object of musings, it would quickly become a competition. There is something specifically detrimental and profit-oriented about the desire that I have for my art to gain public’s attention, emphasize on the word “specific” and “my” because I realize that every artist has their own motivation and expectation by publicizing their artworks and I cannot speak for them. Not only once did I feel some sort of supervision and lingering fear of saying the wrong things at the wrong time. It is not rare for me to project my own insecurity about my authenticity being stolen by pointing out the slightest similarity in people’s writings with mine.
I do not like to have to think about my inflated sense of importance, much less experiencing it. I despise my baseless accusations against other arts simply because I do not have conversations with them like I did with my Wattpad friend. So what if they, indeed, borrowed one or two similar phrases? I use credited references from Taylor Swift’s songs and Rumi’s poems to write my own.
I realized sometime later that the answer is all narrowed down to one thing: communication.
At the end of the day, I write to connect with people. To experience love and reciprocated compassion. I cannot speak for other artists, but I can speak for myself that imitation might as well be damned if only one asks kindly. I understand a person the more I text them and vice versa. I try to dissect a particular topic through lengthy discussions with friends. Writing is a channel, a sanctuary, and on top of all, a form of communication. Thus, my writing is not more important than the people I am trying to connect with through it, but important enough for me to know when it is stripped off its identity. So, does authenticity lead me to alienation? I would say that the issue is not so much related to originality as it is to nonexistent attempt of communication, moreover to detach myself from writing altogether will be the true root of isolation.