Why do we write? The ‘right’ answer would be to point out the obvious and explain how we yearn to leave behind a mark, something that remains when our bodies move on, something to be remembered by.
Though this is true, it’s incomplete. I always say that I started writing this column for the same reason that I do anything in my life: The purely selfish reason that I yearn to make just one person’s life a littel better. What I leave out is usually that one person’s life that has been affected most by the column has been mine.
If you’ve met me, you probably noticed that I’ve printed things that I have never verbalized, and if I have verbalized it has been in passing, as a joke or coded. When we write our ideas out on paper and see them in their rawest forms, even for a fleeting moment, we feel like we finally understand’ what’s going on in our heads.
What I’ve come to realize is that even as much as I can express in this column, no one ever has my full story. I’ve been worried about people judging me when I’m the one choosing what people are allowed to see about me. I’m up for critique and as much as I can argue with a person about what they didn’t get from my column, they’ll never get the whole story. I knew perfectly well, being a psychology major and a master practitioner of neurostrategies and hypnotherapies, that self-diagnosis is a dangerous game.
It’s just as dangerous as when you actually go to a professional who labels you, which I also did when I was 13, knowing how it was really more than just being a normal angsty teen when I was addicted to being depressed. (Thanks for being concerned, Clarence.) I even knew that I could use this column space to do my job of being the resident motivational guru to write something more inspirational, like about how you can change the meanings of past events to mean something better for you.
Honestly, too much gets too polished, edited, deleted or just changed not only by editors, but by our own minds as readers. I can’t get mad at someone for their own interpretation of my writing. I enjoy hearing what people say about my work because it lets me see a peek into their model of the world. It also teaches me how to step into their world and hopefully get better at helping people through the use of language.
When we read, see, hear or even think something, sometimes we feel a little emotional hook. We either decide to invest emotion into arguing it, or repressing it or ‘just not thinking about it,’ because for some weird reason, even at a level in our minds we haven’t gotten in touch with yet, we think that it applies to us in someway.
Call me a relativist, but I think it’s all up to interpretation. Just like I can’t expect you to understand my whole story, without offering it up, I can’t expect to understand you completely. I can just hope that I can understand your story enough that I can step into your world and influence you to help you get what you really want from your life.
I know from some of the emails and comments I’ve received that at least one person understood and was helped. I hope that it at least it gave you something a little lighter to read, or gave you a chuckle. If anything, I know that it at least helped me.
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