Knowing Yourself is Overrated
Our culture lately puts a lot of stock in “knowing yourself.” Knowing who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses. Your passions. I’ve heard it said even that before you can write, you must know who you are.
Utter hogwash.
Writing is as much about the act of discovery as it is anything else. The way I see it, the “me” who is aware of what he does is a small fraction of the entirety. There’s this massive sleeping giant beneath that that wakes up very rarely, but influences everything I do-my subconscious. And my subconscious is really the one earning the living for us when I do creative work. It’s fielding me the visual images, the themes… all the important stuff. I do things like decide where to use the word “said” and where to use something more colorful, like “growled.”
I learn as much about myself but what mysteriously ends up on the page as I do through any kind of serious introspection. And it’s not all good, either. I have some seriously screwed up ingrained notions about some things that I find on the page and have to correct. I hope one day I’ll correct that shit enough that the correction will become the reality, because I get a little tired of my subconscious being so sexist-or whatever.
And anyway, this idea that you can know yourself even partially completely is silly because it seems to imply that we’re finished and unchanging. No, we’re all works in progress. By the time you know one thing about yourself, it’ll probably change, like some kind of Heisenberg principle of self-actualization.
Do I think it is important to explore your own nature? Of course! But do I think having some kind of neigh-complete landscape of your own psychology is a prerequisite for good writing? Absolutely not. I prefer to go wandering, personally. Another one of those “it’s about the journey, not the destination” kinda things. There sure are a lot of those cropping up as I get older.
Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.