To Publicize or Not: Reflections Inspired by Esi Edugyan's Meditations on Solitude and Writing
January 19, 2025 |
| Loving these 'slow days' full of simple meals, loads of reading, writing and morning walks (Jan 2025) |
Good morning beautiful people,
Hope you are enjoying 2025...and keeping warm because these minus weather is on another level.
If you have been here for a minute, you know that I skipped recaps and resolutions last year, to talk about Don. This year, I jumped on the resolution bandwagon, had even done a three-part blog post which I unpublished as I did not feel ready to share my 2024 recap and 2025 plan publicly (at least not yet).
As I continue to re and instead of a vision board of me in dark academia clothing, working in a research lab (y'all know my dream is to become a Professor), I decided to try out a social experiment. My goal for the year, is to work on one thing which I believe is the bridge between me and my Professorship dream.
I started with habit tracking, to see where I am at with that thing, before introducing various conditions that would help improve my relation with it - and if all goes well, this whole experiment will put me on the path to my dreams.
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| Started Habit Tracking the old fashioned way - December 2024 |
Earlier last week, I wondered what would happen if I made this experiment public? I went as far as doing eight 3-5 minute 'day in my life' type mini vlogs before feeling that I need to stick to pen and paper private habit tracking (I could also see my Research Intro Professor shaking his head every time I uploaded a video, and hear him mumble something about confounds and other error inducing factors).
As I was working through the internal conflict of whether to make this whole experiment public or private, I was reminded of an essay by Esi Edugyan that I read towards the end of last year - The Wrong Door: Some Meditations on Solitude and Writing.
The essay is part of Margaret Busby's The New Daughters of Africa, an anthology of short stories, poems and essays by African women across the globe - which I had been reading slowly from November 2019 (when I bought my copy). Over the years, I have discovered amazing writers, and paused my reading to look for other works by them - that is how I discovered Sefi Atta's Bad Immigrant (a MUST READ!!!).
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| Enjoying some avocado toast on the balcony, and reading Sefi Atta's Bad Immigrant (Summer of 2022) |
In the essay that came to mind during my moment of internal conflict, Edugyan proposes that silence, solitude and privacy are important for writing and writers. She goes on to point out that through silence, one is able to go into themselves and meet with the story, then through solitude, one is able to understand and justify why that story, the way it is, and through privacy, create a boundary between themselves, their work, and their audience - this in turn provides the freedom and flexibility to do the loop again - write, justify, let go. She also gives examples for all three points, and highlights how social media has blurred the lines particularly for privacy.
I have no problem with the silence and solitude part, I am very good at withdrawing and separating myself from things and situations, and doing the background work required to stand ten toes down on my work when I decide to share. I, however, struggle with finding balance between how to make myself (and the creation process) public enough to be found by those it is most likely to resonate with, but private enough not to be too caught up to the point that my work is either diluted or expanded to include public relations.
This latter part is part of the reason I started my academic journey...to separate myself and rest after a decade of there not being a clear demarcation of my own mental health and recovery journey, and my advocacy work.
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| Esi Edugyan's Conclusion |
The psychology student side of me is already thinking that I need to start with defining what silence, solitude and privacy mean/look like to me. I also need to figure out, why I want to make this process public? What difference does publicizing (or not publicizing) make? Big picture-wise, how, if at all, does it support my goal of becoming a Professor?
As I write this, I think this is one of the reasons I love blogging here on Blogger (and not substack or medium or any of the other platforms), and cannot stand social media platforms (however hard I try to be on them), is the fact that this blog is public enough for people to read my thoughts with loads of boundaries to allow me to let go, draft more pieces, stand in solitude with them, before sharing.
I do not want to learn how to get more likes, I just want to document...and I wish there was a way I could share this experiment public with that level of 'detachment'...I want people, the right people, to see it, to follow it...but I do not want to know how many saw it, how many liked what they saw...because the goal of it all, if not those numbers...the goal is to figure out how I do this one thing, and how to improve it, so that I can be on my way to being a professor.
Until the next update on this experiment, and my stand on publicizing it, I wish you a lovely week ahead.
Sending love and light,
Sitawa
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