I have not, at any point in my life, been inclined toward diary or essay writing. I have terrible memories of being made to write essays at school, and of not really understanding the point of it. Just like most people thought they didn’t need to know the quadratic formula or where in the body the adrenal glands are, I thought I just didn’t need to know how to write long-form prose. I could see no future where I desired to do so.
Of course, I did not stop writing after leaving education. Well, in a way I did — I have not written more than a few words at a time with a pen or pencil since university — but I have continued to type up until this present day, years after I was last in a lecture theatre. I text my friends. I make up plots for my D&D campaign. I write angry responses to other people’s internet comments. And sometimes, when I am doing these things, I feel like I’m not making the best use of language that I could. Particularly the last one. Why am I so angry? Well, probably because I’m struggling to effectively communicate my ideas to a person whose worldview is so fundamentally different to mine. Our shared assumptions are so few that I cannot meaningfully express my disagreement without being able to articulate concepts that are both incredibly basic and incredibly subtle. And I often fail to do so, which is not surprising, and that then makes me annoyed at my own failings which then is transferred onto the pillock in the internet who caused me to think about these things.
That is a fairly pedestrian observation, and is probably more generally applicable to people on the internet, rather than being a deep insight about myself. But it also makes it sound like I (and many millions of other people) need therapy more than I need practice writing. This is probably true, but I also think that taking time to consider and write down one’s thoughts — especially those thoughts that naturally rouse strong emotions — can be a kind of therapy. It allows our experiences and our feelings and our opinions to stand outside of ourselves. And in this ecstasy it lets us examine those fragments of our identity more clearly, from all angles, as if our presence had departed from them.
This aspiration is where the name of my new website comes from. You likely know that an anechoic chamber is a room within which there are no echoes. An anegoic chamber is one within which there are no egos. A neutral place. A place of perspective, and reconsideration. I hope that my writings here will be of considerably more value, and do considerably less harm, than my writings elsewhere on the Internet.
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