Whatsoever I have given the world, I have quickly snatched back. It’s not that I don’t want to give, but more that I fear the feedback once given. Oh, world, I wonder to myself what value you might place on what I could offer. Rather than giving you a draft to read and letting you make corrections, my imagination is put to use in first creating and then critiquing whatever may be my first draft creation, imagining the criticisms and shortcomings that might have arisen had I presented it to an outside perspective, correcting them preemptively.
So, now is it ready? No, I hold back even this corrected version - because this version means something to me; its dream seems too much to risk. What if it’s presented in all vulnerability and declined? Not corrected but completely declined. My sense of identity, finding no support in the wider world, would be shattered. Like an architect discovering the design of a proposed structure is not feasible in practice. In the end, a good architect is made by putting to paper what then gets put to the world. But this is different, right? What does being a good architect have to do with living an authentic life more generally speaking?
So I keep it to myself, and there are many things in this world that there’s no harm in keeping to oneself. But if what you are keeping to yourself is a form of intended expression, well then you’ve missed the point entirely! Expression, by its nature, has a natural outward flow, damming it within leads to a constant battering of your own walls. A gulf of misunderstanding results, verging on the unbridgeable - who you are is expressed to yourself again and again through regurgitated expression that’s always just as quickly swallowed back down. You grow closer to yourself and further from the world.
Alienation and self-understanding can happen in tandem, but it’s a brutal combination. We need an outward valve; we need the occasional feedback and direction from the world - even, if in the end, we don’t make the changes suggested. Being aware of another voice as it relates to our own - the dose of reality needed to sustain us in connection to the greater “we” in which we inhabit. A reminder, that without the existence of this we, if we refuse or forget to acknowledge it, all attempts at expression (self-expression) are just signs of incipient madness.