There are things you do for yourself. Buying yourself a warm cup of coffee on a cold day, putting the laptop aside and deciding that work can, in fact, wait until tomorrow. There are things you do for others. Holding the door open for a stranger, buying a drink for a friend. And there are things you do to keep up appearances for the generalized ‘other’ in society. Applying deodorant, dressing at least passably, maintaining a generally neutral expression as you walk down the street.

Then there is a strange, gray area that has become increasingly apparent to me in recent months. There are the things you ostensibly do for yourself, but are actually aimed at keeping up appearances for a fictional ‘other.’ Pull out an aesthetic little notebook and scribble on it in a coffee shop. Whistle as you walk down the street. Order in German on a transatlantic flight because you can. Sure, these are actions you can justify as being for you. But some part of you—a part you may not like very much—is performing. You want to look smart, appear whimsically at ease, sound cultured. But for whom? You are performing for people who either aren’t there, or who are but have better things to do than pay attention to you.

When I say “you,” I really mean me, because I don’t know if I’m the only one who experiences this feeling. Perhaps I’ve read too many books. Perhaps I’ve bought into the myth that I’m special and will amount to something. But I’ve found that, sometimes, I do things to maintain outward consistency of the image of myself that I believe would make a noteworthy side-character in a novel. The kind of person worth at least a paragraph of description. And I’m embarrassed by it, because it reveals a hubris that I keep trying to avoid acknowledging to myself. A genuine belief in my own…interesting-ness to others. It’s hard for me to even articulate what this ‘interesting-ness’ entails in my head. Intellect? Thoughtfulness? Kindness? Mystery? It’s certainly a mystery to me.

This embarrassing feeling might not be apparent to others in my life or to those who might see me on the street. After all, it’s so inherently subjective and inward-looking that I’ve gaslit myself into wondering whether it exists at all. Yet there is one place where it is evident and evidenced. It is the pieces I have written in this blog.

I’ve tried to journal for a while, on and off, over the past few years. It’s never really stuck. There’ve been one or two weeks here and there where I managed to journal consistently, but these episodes never lasted. Part of the reason is definitely my mechanical incompetence at writing things on paper with a pen. I suck at it, my handwriting is practically a cipher, and the effort of physically writing makes me lose my train of thought. But I’m beginning to think that part of the reason is that nobody else is paying attention to the book I keep on my desk.

That’s not to say that anyone has been paying attention to this blog. But there is at least a theoretical observer for something like this. This post, as with every other post on this site, can in theory be read by some unknown ‘other’ who will appreciate my writing skills and *deep thoughts* and the like. I think that’s why there’s a catharsis to writing on this blog that I haven’t found anywhere else. Not that that’s kept me consistently posting anything, mind, but it’s a very different kind of release.

Re-reading the posts on this blog has confirmed to me what I have suspected for years. That, despite the grayness of whether I live my life for an imaginary ‘other,’ I have definitely written for one. I see two figures within my teenage poems and reflections. The first is an honest, introspective soul attempting to express itself. The second is a prancing, loud, costumed clown crying out for approbation. George Carlin said something similar was his initial motivation for pursuing comedy. To have somebody look at you and think “ain’t he cute? Ain’t he smart?”

I see it in rhetorical flourishes that, looking back, feel cringeworthy. Case in point, my last post from 2021: “The boat rocks, and the others tell me why. They tell me where I should be going, what lies beyond the setting sun of burning red.” Really, my dude. The setting sun of burning red, real subtle. “The boat rocks.” Ah, cause I named the blog after a galley, right. Smooth.

Or some of the poems I wrote as ‘concept pieces.’ Arachnocampa luminosa was the title of a poem that was just the biological name for glow worms in caves. Sure, I wanted to evoke a gentle luminosity, but looking back I know I was prancing to sound smart. Or The View from Halfway Down, where I try to create a sort of teenage wisdom-vibe by ending an angsty reflection on nostalgia with saccharine clairvoyance on my ’18 years of life.’ Yeesh.

Perhaps the greatest sinner of all is my poem Aurelius. On one hand, the poem is an ode to Meditations, a book that has had a profoundly positive impact on my life. On the other? A vain, pompous, preachy attempt to explain existentialism and stoicism to an imaginary wanderer enthralled by my genius. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but time has not been kind to some of my writing.

Some of this is the standard cringe of looking back at your own angsty teenage self. But for me, a good chunk of this is recognizing where I am being needlessly performative. Where I am not expressing myself, but rather the interesting aspiring-writer version of myself that I think people would be impressed by. And although I’ve changed a lot over the past few years, and I have done battle with this version, this clown—it has not yet been defeated. Perhaps it never will be.

All of this stings particularly badly because performativity is something I tend to decry in others.

Social media drives me up the wall. As pointed out by Bo Burnham, David Foster Wallace, and the Truman Show (to cite just a few), post-postmodern life feels increasingly as if it is being lived for soundbites and Instagram stories. Real experiences can feel like a buffet from which digital performances are carefully picked, packaged, and presented to the wider world. It’s never been something I’ve been able to understand or appreciate, perhaps because I’m a curmudgeon at heart.

Yet is there anything inherently different in what I have been doing in my maybe-performative living and certainly-performative writing? Does it matter if the ‘other’ is a nameless Instagram account or a nameless real-world observer? Perhaps not. No matter how much we try to self-reflect, hypocrisy creeps up on us, festering in our blind spots and unlit psychic corners.

But there is hope. I am able to write this piece because, as of late, the clown has grown quieter. I can take credit for some of this. Over the past few years, every time I have written something small for myself, I have consciously tried to find and eliminate that performative impulse. But some of it might be part of the natural process of maturing, growing older, learning more about myself and the world.

I’ve also begun to realize that I can never fully eliminate the performative impulse. Some part of me will always want someone to read a piece like this and think: “ain’t he smart?” But knowing the impulse is there means I can stop it from interfering with my self-expression. It also means I can harness it to fuel my motivation to journal on this blog.

It’s a delicate balance. Even now I find myself reading back what I have written, putting myself in the shoes of an appreciative reader showering praises on my self-reflectiveness. It’s a hard impulse to harness without losing control and veering into arrogance. But I think it’s worth giving a shot.

I was overly simplistic in criticizing this blog earlier. As I went back through my blog to find nuggets to criticize for performativity, I found flashes of heart and insight that I’m honestly quite impressed by. Both the good and the bad of what I have written on this website are, at various points, time-capsules of a me that no longer exists. A me that was capable of much and that achieved much.

This is perhaps why I have returned to writing here. To leave behind a fragment of my current self. Because when I (almost inevitably) lose steam and put the blog away, I hope that a version of myself somewhere in the future will have the opportunity to reflect and critique and appreciate who I once was.

There’s one more reason I’m writing this. I spend every waking hour thinking, as do we all. But most of it disappears into the ether, swallowed up by either another thought or a real-world interruption. Perhaps this is the performative side of me resurfacing, but I feel like it’s worth trying to develop at least some of these thoughts beyond my own brain, put them to some worthwhile use. After all, many of them coincide with intense, profound emotions that I struggle to convey in words.

We’ll see how long this phase lasts, but I’m glad I took the time to write this out. It’s a windy evening at the end of a productive day and this has healed my soul somewhat. I suppose performances can heal their performers too.