You're the One

"...In spite of the care she devoted to each thing she wrote, as soon as it was finished, she cast it behind her with something like contempt, sometimes with rage. Such things were not what she wanted at all. But what did she want? In a different culture, perhaps, she would have been happier..."

-Ted Hughes, from his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982

The cover of my edition of the journals; notice one side the words, one side the woman...

For anyone who desires to do any kind of writing, it's disheartening to read someone like Sylvia Plath. Even her journals are poetic. Knowing her history, you might want to go in thinking that her entries will be overwrought, melodramatic, or, in the parlance of our times, "emo." Although they're certainly self-absorbed and maudlin at times, they're unflinchingly real and relatable.

As evidenced in Hughes' quote, Plath struggled to find her voice as a writer. This effort suffered from her desire to be published and popular. She often had to tailor or temper her natural style and content to produce what publications wanted. Hughes even went so far as to claim that all but Ariel and the later poems, along with her journals, were the only representation of her true "voice," and that all her other writings were the "waste products" left along the way to finding that voice.

Sylvia and Ted (AKA Bill Pullman's twin)

It's somewhat encouraging that even a literary genius like Plath suffered from those insecurities and produced pieces that were less than representative of both herself and what she was truly capable of as a writer. Hughes explains:

"A real self, as we know, is a rare thing. The direct speech of a real self is rarer still. Where a real self exists it reveals itself, as a rule, only in the quality of a person's presence, or in actions. Most of us are never more than bundles of contradictory and complementary selves. Our real self, if our belief that we have one is true, is usually dumb, shut away beneath the to-and-fro conflicting voices of the false and petty selves. As if dumbness were the universal characteristic of the real self. When a real self finds language, and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event-as Ariel was."

It's important to note that Hughes uses the word "dumb" not in the modern sense that we would, but to mean "mute" as was a common understanding of the word in his generation. He's saying that our true selves are silent, and only once in a great while can that silence find an authentic voice and be shown to the rest of the world. It seems that to get by in a society, to get along with others, we must be "false and petty." I find this to be true, particularly in the American culture. Every time I wrote a journal entry when I was younger, I did it with the notion in mind that someday, someone would read it. I was afraid to write anything too "true," too real. I found myself tempering everything about what I wrote, from the technique to the content, out of fear of being "found out." The writing wasn't true to me, but I was afraid to show "me," anyway, so into the garbage it all went.

Tell me about it.

I don't believe a blog is the place to find your voice as a writer, unless your goal is only that of being a successful blogger. Your audience is too wide and untargeted; it probably includes friends and family who may all have you in a certain, different "niche" in their brains, and when you try to write to please everyone, you probably end up pleasing yourself least of all. I've doubted and questioned myself over and over since starting this blog, and I find that the more I write, the less I care what people think of it, as long as it is serving a purpose for me. That sounds selfish, but everything we do in this world is a selfish act. Even when we help others, it often makes us feel just as good as the person we're helping, which is fine. When we have some sort of release or just spend a little time doing something we enjoy, the happier we feel and the more good energy we can put out into the world. You're the only one you really have to please, and you'll never please anyone else if your happiness isn't your first priority.
[Cue end of cliche]

Even Plath wore a bikini