I’ve recently made a conscious decision to try and materialize my thoughts and ideas on paper succinctly and with very little author-tweaking. Initially, I felt dissatisfied by my very obvious inability to fully dissect and regurgitate my internal mind-narrative, to come up with word and image designs and then to start putting them into action. I had been thinking inside of an airtight box, and I knew I could expand the walls to the point where they would collapse. But it would take time, patience, and a very deliberate sort of introspection. Through this process, I’ve discovered that much of my frustration comes from a kind of unavoidable self-censoring, an anemic lexicon, and a mile-high mound of self-doubt.
And I’m most definitely not the first person to feel this way. Folks much more eloquent than I have written at length on self-doubt, on nascent ideas and the process of their maturation, and on their own limitations, which seem to be rather universal conditions. On the other hand, these people have found a way to express such feelings, which I have been struggling to do for the past hour, sat here on my laptop.
The first time I came across any piece of writing relating to this problem was in reading Kafka’s Diaries. This is probably a pretty typical introduction to any writing on « writer’s block », as Kafka writes exhaustively on his « inability to write », constructing some of the most beautiful sentences my eyes have ever been graced with. He unfolds the innermost layers of himself and releases them onto the page so effortlessly, so purely! It’s as if his mind was free of the fetters of self-doubt and censorship, and he felt safe enough to turn on the tap of his stream of consciousness. Unfiltered and straight from the source. I fucking wish!
And yet he still struggles. He still feels weighed down, he still feels inadequate.
« My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest — so what is it then? That I do not know this is probably connected to my inability to write » (Diaries, 1910).
I feel really deeply about this work, and I admire Kafka’s capacity to go into the dredges of himself in order to find the seed of his qualms. He does this in various ways throughout his Diaries, thoroughly but laconic still.
I think I’d write all the time if I could write like Kafka.
More recently, too, as I was thinking of writing on this horrible condition, I read a piece on self-doubt in Real Review, a sick architecture quarterly based in London. I wasn’t looking for anything on doubt, and I certainly didn’t think I would find anything on it here. But the title, « Doubting Doubt » by Vilém Flusser was staring at me straight in the face and I dove into it, searching for answers to my own dilemma. « Doubt », Flusser writes, « as an Intellectual exercise, provides one of the few pleasures we know. As a moral experience, however, it is torture… in extreme or excessive doses, it paralyses all mental activity ». If I thought I related to Kafka, boy do I relate to this.
And here I am, staring at this unfinished piece of work after three weeks (in a completely different country) and actually doubting the message i’m trying to convey, the words I’ve used, the platform I’ll be sharing it on, how the content I put out will be received… And even though I’ve been fully aware of my own self-doubt, its tentacles are still both far-reaching and insidious. The result, as Flusser observes, is paralysis. I seem to be suffering the most extreme of cases (an exaggeration, I am aware).
At the same time, though I have been doubting myself left and right and up and down and backwards and forwards — it is the thing that has fueled my desire to tear it apart it and to confront it head on. I’ve created this platform, The Aléatoire, in order to come to terms with my creative and intellectual insecurities, hoping that perhaps I would be able to encourage a doubt-shedding space free of the shackles of pretension and full of friendly debate.
I am curious to watch the evolution of this project, and to « learn in public » alongside my brilliant pals. Perhaps my self-doubt will diminish to its pleasurable point. Perhaps it will worsen. Whichever is true, I will persist!
