Echoes of you

Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872

I sometimes think about writing under a pen name. Poor Richard, Silence Dogood, Voltaire, Mark Twain — they all did.

I wish I could ask them why. Compare their answers to mine. At least that’s what I tell myself when maybe what I really desire is more like vindication by association. A feeling of not-aloneless to serve as hollow relief from facing cowardice or other affectations of keeping a safe distance from the rawest form of oneself. Because that’s what your own voice is, anyway, isn’t it? It’s what’s left over, underneath it all.

I want to find my own voice, to say everything I have to say.

Being comfortable in your own skin is knowing yourself and letting everyone else know you too. And a lot of writing, at least what draws me in, is simply in pursuit of that goal. A desire to move ever closer to a truer expression of oneself.

Writing has done just that, revealing me to myself. Most the time, I shout into the universe not hoping for a response. I listen for the echoes bouncing off the blank page, and they sound the way a cringingly distorted recording of one’s own voice always does. Do I really sound like that?

I’m comfortable with it now, my voice, even if it does sound an octave higher than I’d hoped. And I’ve grown quite adept at shouting at blank pages, if that’s something even worth bragging about.

Now I’m in a different bind. More convoluted.

I want to write about other people. But I wonder where the tip of their noses begin and my right to flail my limbs wildly ends. I own my experience and am tempted to call that just cause for using it as I please, but there’s a totalizing violence to memorializing things on a page that I can’t seem to justify away.

I could shout about the time a good friend let me down, not to bury the hatchet in a destructive modality but rather a constructive one. I need to feel around the walls of the maze of trust and forgiveness to discover where I end up. For instance, there was a time in my life when I held grudges for much longer, imagining some justice in holding out as if it were a sort of imperative of mine to dole out punishment as a corrective to shape how others behave. I’ve learned what is right is not always right, though, and people will disappoint you, and envisioning some sort of gravitational field of righteousness around yourself is both infeasible and honestly somewhat egocentric.

Or I could shout about my ex or that two-week fling that ended abruptly and unceremoniously, letting the echoes reverberate off the walls of other mazes I clumsily fumble around in. Intimacy, love, independence, attachment — words whose meanings and primacy to me change with every new person I become even remotely romantically involved with. The number of walls I bump into gives new meaning to love is blind.

For now I’ve chosen to write under my own name, resolving that anything I’m willing to write I should be just as willing to take responsibility for. Writing behind a pen name feels to me like talking behind people’s backs, something I’ve made an effort to avoid altogether.

Would you feel comfortable saying everything you’ve said about others to them? Or writing under your real name? Or would you even feel comfortable responding to this publicly where everyone can see your thoughts and know they are yours?

The irony is, even if others don’t know these thoughts are yours, you do. You can’t escape your own knowing, and hiding it from others in the “best case” only creates a disconnect between your realities and theirs. It also creates a dissonance between you and you, a most pernicious load-bearing fiction whose stand-in for reality sees your Mark Twain penning the life of your Samuel Clemens in a story told without the edifying power to prevent the tale from wagging the dog.