Personal Essay

I’ve had this idea for a post floating around in my head for a long time about how we’re defined by the things we like.  I never had a clear idea of where to go with it, but one night when I had time to write, but no strong feeling for what to write, I decided to take a crack at it.  Two painstaking paragraphs later, I gave up, mostly as a result of boredom.

Reading over those paragraphs, I realized why I’d been bored.  They read like the writing of someone else.  Like the social commentary of a person who didn’t really care.

It’s strange the way you’re taught to write in school.  It’s not the same in every discipline, but in order to advance my writing in grad school, I had to unlearn most of what I’d been taught in high school.  The worst of it was the way they taught us to avoid the word I like the plague.  I still remember the first time I said the world I in an academic paper. It was such a relief to avoid all the trouble of trying to say what you’re arguing and how as if you are not a real person with interests and biases and intuitions.  I’m grateful for the way we’ve stopped pretending we can be objective.  It makes the language way less awkward.

It’s not just about the word I.  It’s about going beyond what has already been said to offer a new perspective, but with full awareness that it is only one perspective and necessarily limited.  It’s more intellectually honest and, I think, way more interesting.  It’s hard for some people write as themselves.  They’d prefer to get lost in third person language.  For me, it’s the opposite.  I have no voice if I’m not writing as myself.  And no interest or stake.

Writing as yourself doesn’t require first person language, though I think language is powerful enough to change your feeling for what you’re writing, so saying I reinforces that you’re writing from a specific context and saying what you think rather than repeating what others have said.  I often slip into second person you as an unconscious stylistic choice.  It’s personal still, but more obviously extends beyond just me.

Writing from a personal perspective has been unfairly characterized as writing with no regard for facts.  I think that has to do with the way we devalue feeling and place it in opposition to reason. To me, strong reasoning is as big a part of personal writing as anything else.  So is the effort to be objective by considering all evidence.  But, writing from a personal perspective helps us get closer to the reality of things, because we acknowledge our own biases and we can be more honest about what we really experience.  What can we really know about anything, but our experiences of them?

I could go on in every direction about this topic.  It plays a very big role in my life as a scholar.  But more than that, personal writing is simply my preference.  It’s how I best express myself.  It’s the way I am most engaged in writing and all the things I write about.  And it’s the style I most enjoy reading. Writing from other perspectives or as if I have no perspective rings false to me.  So does writing about things I don’t care about.  If I cannot find some kind of personal angle–and I almost always can, even about the must mundane things–then my writing is stilted and I am off somewhere else.  I am back to working on that post about how what we like defines us, but this time I’m writing as me.