When You're Sick of Everyone's Voice, Including Your Own

I'm sick of writing in the first person.

All these journal entries that sound the same. I pick up a pen and scribble for a while and think, "Why the fuck would anyone give a shit about this guy?"

I'm surrounded by words all day long. So many people talking. People talking so much. And then you try to find a moment of peace on a train or a subway platform, and someone's watching a crime drama on their phone without headphones, or a businessman is barking through a deal that just can't wait, or that big-haired big-mouthed lady is having another one sided conversation about every last member of her family with a seat mate who barely utters a word. I mean, the trains are at about 10% ridership but there's always one person talking. Maybe that's the problem: when it's just one, it really grabs your attention.

I don't listen to music to hear music anymore but to drown out the voices of others. There's a white noise app that works pretty good but I might be jacking it up so high it's damaging my hearing. And then I wonder if that might be a blessing. I remember my grandfather would always give me a sly little smile when he turned off his hearing aid.

I've tried doing a little meditation lately and it seems to help. This lady claims you only need 12 minutes a day to see measurable improvements in focus. And sometimes I find a bit of focus and think, when I get a day off I'm gonna focus the hell out of some personal projects!

But now I'm in the middle of a blizzard with no internet and an empty day and a blank piece of paper, and I've been staring out into the whiteness for half an hour thinking--well, not thinking at all, really. Just blank. There's nothing there. My brain has been so buffeted by conversation and obligation and news and media and the few minutes of video games I occasionally squeeze into the margins, so full of all this external stuff, that there's nothing left at the core of it. There is no "I" left to speak.

People seem to enjoy talking to me. But when I have a conversation, 95% of my words don't come from any internal "self" or locus of control. Rather, they're responses to expectation, social reflexes that have been gradually programmed in, manifestations of a survival instinct that demands: You better be nice or someday you'll be cast out of the tribe to starve.

I work so I can eat. I make repairs to the house so it doesn't fall down. I exercise so that my body won't break down. But it's not like I particularly want to do any of that stuff. It's all obligation, performed with low-grade resentment and anxious haste, in the hope that the sooner I get through it the sooner I can--what? Relax? Enjoy myself? Pursue some kind of hobby of my own choosing? Pour a drink?

But a day like this comes, when I'm supposed to be working from home but the internet keeps flaking out, and it's like, meh, I'm all right just staring out the window.

Later I'll have to shovel, and at some point I'll need to eat. But for now there's just this blankness, and it's terrifying how okay it all feels.

I'm aware how self-indulgent this all sounds. And that's why I'm sick of writing in the first person. I've kept a lot of blogs over the years, not to mention a huge four-drawer file cabinet of journals and notes (since digitized and thrown away) and I don't like going back and reading them. Who the fuck was this asshole and why did he spend so much time scribbling and typing?

(Also, there's a growing body of evidence that using a lot of first person pronouns indicates depression. Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, both dedicated personal-journal scribblers. They may have left some great work behind but I'm not interested in living a life like theirs.)

There's too many bloody words in the world already. Every day a new newspaper in the driveway. At least those contain a bit of actual news. Still, I cancelled my subscription when the pile of recycling reached a meter high, and I'd never had the energy to read more than a couple pages.

Besides, reading on a screen just feels more natural, now.

I used to buy books in hopes of reading them someday, or re-reading the ones I'd finished. After a couple of decades I gave them away. Now I read digitally, or borrow from the library, so that all those excess words don't pile up around me. An unread book feels like an obligation, while a finished book serves as a reminder of just how much we've forgotten.

Is a literate society more kind? More wise?

I'm not sure. People still fetishize books. John Waters said, "We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them." But I'm not looking to get laid at the moment. And I've seen a couple of Waters' movies and they didn't exactly fill me with respect for humanity.

Not sure why I'm going on about books here. Maybe because, in the past, I'd be reading on a day like this. Maybe because I'm looking for a way to justify the fact that, despite all this whinging, I'm still writing. It's this habit I can't seem to drop. Even though, any time I go back through stuff I've written, it makes me depressed, anxious, even angry. Maybe because, back when I felt something that might have been ambition, I thought I wanted to be "a writer," make a living with words. Publish novels, I guess. Now I'm just embarrassed by them. Gratefully they're still in a drawer. (A digital drawer.)

In business, we're advised to set goals and visualize "what success looks like." One day I applied this to the life of a writer. Books on shelves with my name on them, people dreaming in worlds I described, attention, criticism, posterity. And then the demands and expectations of more: it's all kind of the opposite of what I want out of life.

This sounds like sour grapes. Maybe it is. Except that I never really jumped that hard to reach them. I realized I hadn't been writing in the pursuit of any particular goal. I wrote because I couldn't help it. It's just what I did sometimes, instead of sitting still.

So what do I want, exactly?

I don't really know at the moment, sitting still, staring into a blizzard that's granting me the first bit of free time I've experienced in a month. To live quietly and fade away without bothering too many folks. To get a good night's sleep. To listen, really listen, to some quiet corner of the world somewhere and not feel compelled to comment on it.

There's this, sometimes: I'd like to take a vow of silence. Go for a year, say, without using my voice.

Sometimes, in the middle of conversations that I can't control, I fantasize about having my vocal cords removed. A sort of verbal vasectomy. (And then I contemplate how lucky we are to have never had children. Oh God, the amount of conversation that would require.)

I'd like to spend some time in solitary confinement. If I ever commit a crime, it had better be a gnarly one. Maybe renting a cottage in a desert somewhere would be a less permanent solution. But it probably wouldn't have the same kind of climate control.

It's an overreaction, to be sure. But there are times in the day I'm so hungry for aloneness it feels like drowning.

Absurd wishes, both. And as unlikely to come true as a lottery win. But they do swirl around the hind-brain, and surface on busy days, and twinkle with the comforting reassurance that: you know what? I can still desire something sometimes, something that's just mine, just a little.

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