For me, a soft-spoken person, there is a certain power I feel when I get to speak in front of people. Background noise is at a minimum, people are tuned in, I don’t have to yell to be heard. But a typical presentation can feel a bit stuffy; I dislike the unidirectional flow of information. Where’s the intrigue? Where’s the pizzaz? So when my friend Mia invited me to have a conversation in an intimate setting for a small audience, my heart leapt.
Above is an excerpt of our hour-long conversation in which we talked about creativity, the validity of introspection as a form of research, the circuitous path my life has taken, and more. I think this bit at the beginning is the juiciest part, though.
Hyper-specificity, or committing wholeheartedly to the expressing the exact details of your experience, is a portal to universality. The product of universality then, in my estimation, is connection. This mantra or meditation or practice (or whatever it is) has guided me in my recent creative pursuits.
I previously attempted to do the opposite with my writing. I struggled (and invariably failed) to create some grand summation of humanity. I thought that’s what I was supposed to be doing. It was like juicing a stone.
Now my inner voice says, “Drill down into your experience, and don’t make it legible for the sake of your reader - use the words that you’d use to describe it, not the word you thesaurus-ize until it has become dissociated from its original meaning. Say it in Japanese, in English, who cares? Refer to something no one else will understand.” When I commit to this, I feel more alive. My words feel sharper and truer.
By committing to this, I don’t know if I’ve bettered my odds of writing something which would appease my younger self’s blind ambition. But I do know that I feel better. Smarter, even. More empathetic.
There’s something here which is transferrable to the way I interact with the world. I am more skilled at holding nuance and simultaneity. By allowing myself space to exist in my expansiveness, there is more room for others to do the same.
There is power in sharing your story with exactness, exploring the spikes and spirals that contour our life stories. If I were your editor, I would say this: “Write to an audience of one: yourself.”
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