A Confession — Why I’m Here
What it means for me to say “I am a writer”
[Truth Units is now published, plus follow-up pieces linked at the bottom of the article you are reading now, which was written in Nov 2001.]
Several weeks ago, I entered the Medium community as a writer. Being in the community, attending to what people were saying and writing about, made me nervous, anxious, maybe even frightened. It got me asking myself “in what sense am I writer — a Medium writer?”
I want to answer this question to find out whether or not I belong on Medium. I realize the question is ultimately nonsensical — if you come to Medium and start writing — which I have done — then of course you are a Medium writer. An artist once told me her answer to the question “what is art?” is “whatever I say it is.” She meant that if she created something and called it “art” then that made it art. Even if some other people don’t think so, I believe Medium is intended to be that kind of space for “writers.”
That said — and please bear with me here, this might be a complete misperception on my part — it seems to me many Medium writers write because they like writing. The Medium ecosystem seems to attract and reward people who publish frequently, perhaps as much as daily. I imagine these people are fulfilled — either internally, because it feels good — or externally, because the reader response feels good — or both. Or maybe it just helps pay the bills.
In saying this, I don’t mean to categorize or judge anyone one way or another. I’m envious of people who can crank out large numbers of readable words day after day. And I’m sure many people are happy not writing all the time — they might be on Medium just because they like reading!
On the one hand, I love writing. I wrote my first story as soon as I was capable of writing simple sentences — I think in 1st or 2nd grade. My career over the decades has largely been about writing — writing myself, editing or critiquing others’ writing, and recommending when things should be written, about what points and of what length. Sometimes I write when I know it’s unnecessary, knowing my audience doesn’t want to read it , somehow feeling justified and/or repressing my sympathy for their displeasure.
On the other hand, given the slings and arrows, I tend to question my sanity when I write without an inner purpose and without a purpose welcomed by my audience, whoever that might be.
When my mother died, we siblings met to discuss what to do for the service, etc. It was a given, briefly mentioned, that I was the one to write Mom’s obituary and eulogy. I hadn’t thought about it in advance, and I wasn’t looking forward to it — knowing it would involve tears recalling the past, and feeling empty when I couldn’t do justice to everything she gave to me, our family, to other people, to life.
It was also a given, briefly mentioned, that I was to deliver the eulogy. The external “audience” purpose of course was there — family, friends — maybe a hundred or more people present she had touched in total. The internal purpose? It was on my shoulders, so I had to make it the best eulogy it could be, because it was about Mom.
My only option was to leave it all on the field. I had to have faith nobody could write and deliver a better eulogy. Otherwise, I’d look like a fool. If anyone could have done it better, why didn’t they step up? Why was I put up there to flail around helplessly? I did my best to make sure no one thought “I could have done better than that.”
So you can see I have some conflicted feelings and insecurity about writing — how having a definitive purpose saves me from feeling I’m just taking up space on people’s screens, feeling it’s arrogant of me to believe I have cause to get up on a soapbox.
So that’s why I came to Medium with a specific purpose, which I’ll get to shortly. However, upon spending time here, I discovered purpose I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect Medium to offer community.
A psychiatrist I saw for several years until his death told me “you should find a circle of people you can share ideas with.” His view was I didn’t have enough people in my life to share ideas with, that sharing ideas was key to social engagement and camaraderie for me. I had that in college and for some years after — but not so much after career, marriage and kids swallowed me. (I’d occasionally treat friends to verbal dissertations on The Lion King and why Barney the purple dinosaur was a “higher-consciousness being.”)
So on Medium it’s been a renewed pleasure in life just reading the ideas in people’s stories, responding to their ideas, and getting their responses back, and reading other people’s responses. I realized that’s the social engagement my psychiatrist recommended, and he was right — it’s been a major spark of fulfillment for me. When I’m engaged on Medium, it stops me from worrying about what I’m doing with my life, because it feels like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
OK — my specific purpose for writing on Medium! Please forgive me taking so much of your time to provide the human context above.
For the last 20 years, I’ve been writing an answer to the question “what is truth?” About 10 years ago I gave it the title Truth Units.
I hope to publish Truth Units in a few months. I came to Medium with the idea this would be the place to publish it.
It’s been a long, slow struggle, because I knew nobody wanted to read an answer to the question “what is truth?” that came from me — in other words, from a complete nobody. After all, arguably, nobody has ever successfully answered that question to humankind’s satisfaction.
Although I’ve always been interested in philosophy (via sci-fi, Berkeley, Descartes, existentialism, Don Juan), I began reading it seriously 20 years ago, starting with books on Wittgenstein’s thinking. His perspective gave critical mass to my thinking about truth — focused around the idea of what I called “epistemological responsibility” — people’s ability to justify the truth of their beliefs.
As you might guess, I thought highly enough of my ability to question the ability of others. Yet as you might not guess, although I’ve implied it above, I needed to resolve my doubts about my ability to take a stand, to communicate it, and to support it enough to make my case. The only way I had survived in my career was by making sure there were no chinks in my armor.
So for 20 years, I read philosophy (and other related books and articles), taking each new insight as a challenge to either revise my thinking, or critique or refute what I read. I think I’ve now done everything I can do on my own.
This link lists what I’ve read:
The next step I see is to publish a prototype/draft of Truth Units on Medium to see what further challenges it elicits. What’s perfect about Medium is the incredible range of perspectives on Medium — people from many different backgrounds, knowledgeable in so many different areas, with many different conceptions of what philosophy is or should be about.
My hope is to receive incisive critiques and revise Truth Units further, to the point where there are no chinks in its armor against its most demanding challenges.
I talked above about inner and outer purpose. The outer purpose of Truth Units, if I may speak candidly, is to achieve an incremental advance in philosophical thinking and to facilitate dialog about what’s true to lift society a little — a point of reference in our post-truth world.
The inner purpose of Truth Units, given how much thought has gone into it, is to give it a chance to see if it can fly. I read David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers biography after visiting Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. From the book, I knew how hard they worked, and what a long difficult journey it was to get from Dayton Ohio to Kitty Hawk, and how very few comforts of civilization were out there at the time.
From standing at the site where they flew their plane, I realized what a intimidating moment they faced. The landscape is barren, it’s cold and overcast, and the wind is blowing hard. The natural world itself was telling them they were fools. Fools! I imagine the only way they could wake up, leave their cabins, trudge over the sand, lay down the take-off track, position their plane, and fire up its homemade engine was by telling themselves over and over again “we’ve just got to see if it flies.”
They had come so far, they had to find out.
Thank you for reading!
Check out all Truth Units articles:
