This theme is objectively fascinating, actually…

Writing what feels like home vs foraging for dimension in the wilderness?

For Recovering People-Pleasers: On Safety vs Writing

Writing truly opens our eyes to the safety or precarity of language.

We tend to say what feels safe (palatable or polite), in public, in daily life. But writing is the arena where all is said. And, sometimes, we don’t realise how we relate to certain things, symbols, concepts or people until we touch the language around them.

Politeness and respectability in every day life mean we remain safe and adequately accepted, though there may be some self-betrayal involved. Candidness means social contracts are broken; the way people see us, adjusted. We become exposed to rejection and attack, alliances forming against us. Our brains may tell us it will be the same after we’ve written candidly.

They create an illusion of catastrophe even when no real social fall out can happen -given that our readers are usually people who already can stomach what we write or are not repelled when they disagree with our perspective.

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What you have trouble writing out loud tells you who that piece of writing is for -that is, who your desired audience is; usually, I write for myself but sometimes my essays feel like a one-sided conversation with my community whom I realise are steeped in cultures of male worship. Thus, I usually have trouble being candid when writing topics that take a closer look at patriarchy; I start bargaining in my writing, I start sugarcoating, reaching into my cultural conditioning, I make an utter mess of things, at worst I even start sounding like the opposite of how I talk or live in real life -which is allowed in writing but in essays it comes off as an illegal misrepresentation or cowardice.

Yet writing about any topic at all under the sun should be, among other things, a fun thought experiment. Fun in the sense that no one has to feel that it’s warranted or interesting, but some do and it’s always eye-opening to find out why they do. Cue all the books that ever got you shook yet the theme didn’t seem appealing, initially. The mind should be allowed to go where it wants and no one should be off limits. Yet it’s easier to critique religion than a group of mortals?

Still, there remains a personal mandate to say what I mean. After all, if not in writing, then where can total freedom be found? But the words get stuck at the tips of my fingers. Because it feels unsafe to let them go. Again, it’s supposed to be possible to critique all manner of characters in society just for the love of thinking -after all, everybody easily critiques women as a concept in society. But the logic of the people-pleasing subconscious is that if a topic will cause people to shut down and refuse to hear you, why would you write about it? “That alienation is too dangerous.”

Not being agreed with is neutral and then there are times when it feels like the beginning or the middle of something dangerous. At least, this is what our conditioning may say.

Learning the skill of showing up even when you cannot be safe/heard/agreed with: Apply the practice of NOT writing for an audience to all pieces and forms of writing, especially when there’s a group of people you’d like to ‘monologue with’ now or in future -if I may call this one-sided conversation that. You’ll be surprised who might decide to hear you -if that remains important after the exercise. These judgments are created despite what others are actually thinking. Social attitudes shift long before certain opinions become mainstream. Also, your own environment may be more stringent than others, leading you to project onto readers who wouldn’t have had the same hang ups as you. Forget the readers while writing, then give readers the benefit of the doubt afterwards. In fact, surrender the project. Maybe no one will read it. But you must tell the truth according to your genuine perspective, minus your conditioning.

Different writers are drawn to different topics and it is a tragedy to deprive your point of view of a theme it wants to examine. For instance, some writers may be intrigued by interrogating the rule of men and all it perpetuates in society -good, mild or bad. (Good in quotes for those in the West, good ol’ good for black African women; the former is ready to overhaul everything, the latter leans on the cultural perspective of duty, compromise and benevolent patriarchy. It’s a long story that I love to see examined because the assumed superiority of men has been the crux around which we’re all organised -not God- and it’s intriguing to see people wrap their minds around this and what it actually means, ignore it, attempt to consciously accept it, attempt to live otherwise or attempt to change it while living otherwise. It is simply interesting nomatter which way you go… especially if you distance yourself and think of it as if we were all characters in a novel.

If it wasn’t men and it was anything or anyone else it would still be interesting to dissect because imagine a world running on a core philosophy for thousands of years only for people to decide otherwise… imagine everything that could happen next.

I’m enthralled with this movie. I hope more people are starting to understand that there are more themes to explore concerning patriarchy than dating and marriage -even though that’s a major theme and will draw the most public interest. The pervasive nature of patriarchy means the mainstream has only scratched the surface.) All this to say, this is a topic like any other and should never be too hot to handle. It’s intriguing when it psychologically comes across that it is. The ‘why’ of this is worth examining and writing, whenever the conviction is there. Yes, patriarchy has real consequences; yes it fosters a culture of all forms of violence and domination from emotional to physical and yes, we all perpetuate it whether through indifference towards toxic norms or by being the -usually- man who violated somebody (girl, woman, boy, man, nonbinary). It’s crucial that some are writing about all those perspectives.

What fascinates me is how different cultures either come to terms with it or alter it and why. (I doubt it will be truly dismantled in our lifetime. And there won’t be matriarchies popping up everywhere in our lifetime, either; no, having a president who is a woman does not automatically mean matriarchy. I doubt the rule of women is wanted; rather, people seem to be leaning towards a third option…) The English-speaking Internet tends to make the modern world sound so philosophically uniform, yet it’s really not still.

For instance, it’s not really that any of the epiphanies on social media are a surprise to Africans. There’ve been feminist movements on the continent even in precolonial histories. And men and women are more obvious about their patriarchal conditioning on the continent than in the West. The intriguing thing is the brand of stoic that modern African women are about these patriarchal dynamics for various reasons and how it influences the way they’d live a movement when they do actively participate…

That said, write what you want to nomatter how personally daunting that particular topic may be to you for whatever reason, given that you’re not in any real physical danger. Challenge your psychological alarm bells because therein lies a story, or maybe a lesson on writing through resistance, or on writing without lying to yourself -which is a skill in itself.

I think some alarm bells mean that certain writers are still shy to be objective about particular topics. The key to unlocking that type of writer’s block is in finding out *why* this is even happening, why certain subjects of thought experiments are culturally supposed to be sided with -or cast aside. Suspend any assumptions you already have, and inspiration will come flooding in.

#African #BlackAfrican #Feminism #Patriarchy #PeoplePleasing #PsychologyOfWriting #SelfRespect #Writing #WritingPsychology #WritingWhileAfrican