a private life

have I been living too publicly?

At some point this month, as I sat in a feeling of ambiguity, I ventured onto my favorite astrologer’s site and looked at the June 2024 horoscope. Say what you will about astrology, but Alice Sparkly Kat has a way of framing horoscopes as ways of thinking worth considering, offering tools for self-reflection that feel useful. This month, the horoscope  for my sun sign, Cancer, focused on privacy, and this section stood out: 

Nurture your privacy. Nourish it. Allow your inner world growth. Examine your fantasies and record your dreams. You’re not the just parts of yourself that you share with other people. You don’t have to be defined by what you share because you’re not a public resource. You have a self that you keep to yourself too. You even have a self that you keep from yourself.

With this idea of self-preservation through privacy, there’s the implication that inner world growth is impeded by a lack of privacy, that there’s a self that atrophies when sharing abounds. Put another way, being public with your thoughts and feelings is rewarded with connection and external validation, while keeping things private is more difficult and rewarded with self-respect and self-knowledge. 

Facing these ideas, I couldn’t help but think about how much of my life has been shared publicly over the years. In college, in different parts of my life, I’ve shared nearly all of my thoughts with someone else, whether via text or via tweets. These have felt like connection, these have led to connection. Humans are social animals, I would think, and believed that meant that I needed everyone to know everything that was happening in my head to feel connected to me. The more that I shared the more validation I got, so what could possibly be wrong with any of this?

I’ve built my entire writing career on sharing my thoughts publicly — focusing on putting out work consistently for a long time, knowing that hearing feedback on my weekly newsletters makes me feel incredible. Is there anything more wondrous than hearing positive things about something you put effort into? The experience is propulsive, pushing me from week to week to deliver writing repeatedly for almost seven years now. 

But with writing, or with anything at all, if I continuously seek external praise for every little thing that I do, how could I build self-respect and self-confidence in what I’m doing? Have I ever really given myself a chance to feel, to revel in the results of my actions, be it my writing or anything else that I’ve gotten used to sharing, from photos of my poor attempts at cooking to entire newsletters dedicated to small household tasks? Did I let myself be proud of my actions without the need for another to validate that the action mattered? Or did I only feel good in anticipation of external praise I might receive for these actions?

Because I have so little non-public writing compared to my visible body of work, I wonder if I ever learned to build conviction in my ability to evaluate my own work and build confidence in the quality of it. With every piece that I’ve published that has performed well in the last few months, I’ve had an inkling that I was writing something better than usual. Yet, with these pieces, I felt unable to hit send on them until I shared them with someone else to confirm that I was even writing something coherent. It made no sense — even as I found myself crafting sentences and paragraphs that felt abnormally cogent and interesting, feelings of doubt would creep in, overwhelm.

I wonder if my ability to evaluate and edit my own work is made weaker by the fact that I’ve so often relied on simply sending my work out to get a sense of the quality of it. Rather than taking the time to repeatedly iterate on most of the things I’ve written, I usually send out a second or third draft to meet the weekly cadence. Rather than letting myself truly sit with my own work, finding the deficiencies in it and being able to push it further along to something I feel confident in, I’ve so often just sent what felt good enough without ever really understanding what good means to me. 

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I’ve been getting into fashion again, in a way that I haven’t ever before. Even though I’ve spent years thinking about clothing, gathering inspiration, and obsessively looking at new pairs of shoes online, I’ve always held myself back from actually trying anything new. My self-consciousness has held me back from actually trying on anything that’s different from what I’m used to or what feels conventional. Even small things like looser-fitting pants feel like a huge leap when you’re only comfortable with the safest possible fits. But this time is different; I’ve been trying all sorts of combinations of clothes, seeing how they drape together along my body, and wearing them out around the neighborhood and even to the office. 

With these outfits, I’ve fully embraced the possibility that they might look insane or just plain bad, but I enjoy the process of constructing outfits enough that I’m willing to wear things out just to get used to different types of clothing on my body. I realize that no one really cares that much what I’m wearing and feel unfazed if and when people don’t mention my clothes at all. Since I’m having such a good time just seeing how different shapes go together and trying new ideas, I’m unbothered by the lack of validation. In this way, fashion has become a private outlet for me, one where I can play around and figure things out for myself. The external validation isn’t factoring in, so my internal feelings around it are able to flourish.

I think this is how I want to approach everything, including my writing — letting myself sit in the feelings that come to me while doing whatever I’m doing. What if I started spending my time only doing things that I truly felt like doing instead of being compelled by others, consciously or subconsciously? I would like to be more intentional about how and when I share, how and when I operate publicly versus privately. How much do people need to know the many thoughts or feelings I experience throughout the day, and how might sitting with those thoughts and feelings help me to understand myself instead?

Maybe I’ll figure it out and tell you about it later, or maybe I’ll keep it to myself.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - YO NO ERA ASÍ PERO DE AHORA EN ADELANTE, SÍ by Diego Raposo - super fun Spanish hyperpop

• POEM - “The City” by CP Cavafy - Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here,