On slowness and saying "irrelevant" things
I'm currently trying to push myself to write more things that feel irrelevant to me. There's a voice in my head that says, "everyone else figured that out already, they don't want to hear it again," which leads me to not saying or publishing most of the things that I get an impulse to write.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how slow I feel. I think that most things just take a while for my brain to fully ingest. There have been too many times that I've said something that felt like an epiphany only to be essentially told, "Yeah, duh," 1 or I missed something right in front of me because I was too busy processing something else that was also right in front of me.
I sometimes catch myself performing the same thing at others, sometimes in my head and sometimes out loud. It sucks. It's a habit that's held over from trying so hard to be likeable in high school and college. I needed to be right! Not just in school, but also (and especially) in social situations. I needed to laugh at the right things, notice the right things, have the right opinions.
I was (and to a significant extent still am) horrified to be seen as wrong or bad. And part of that involved enforcing the hierarchy by pointing out when others were also slow to notice things. And keeping my mouth shut if I wasn't sure that what I wanted to say was relevant.
But the thing I have to remind myself is, if something wasn't immediately obvious to me, there's probably other people out there that also didn't see it. And even those lessons we might have learned early were still learned--we didn't always know them. Even if one other person gains a new way of understanding or thinking about the world or their life, I think that's worth it. Fuck it, even if zero people learn something new, at least I had a good time writing!
I want to write more, and to share my perspectives, and just because some people think those perspectives are old hat doesn't mean they're worthless. I can't know everything that's happening and always have something witty to say. And by "I," I also mean "you." You can write it if you want to.
To be fair, I do think that most truths sound like no-brainers when you try to verbalize them, but feel very different when you understand them.↩