Writing is usually a rewarding experience--you get to talk about issues of your personal interest, and to provide your insights (i.e. opinion) on these issues. This is why I blog--to have a space to share my thoughts, put them into writing, to inscribe, and to let words take their own life.
Some people write to judge: newspaper commentators, critical theorists, products reviewers, etc. To the extent that writing is rewarding, writing to judge is easy--in the sense that as long as you can make a sound argument with fair rationales, writing to judge is about one's ability to understand fully, and then to point out the pros and cons of something based on such understanding. The target is concrete, the task is straightforward, and the objective is clear. That's what I meant by easy.
On the other hand, writing could be one of the most painful experience--if one writes to be judged. I've been wanting to blog about this thought regarding writing to be judged for the last couple of months as I was going through my personal crisis of writing to be judged. I was writing an article for submission, in the meantime, writing some essays to apply for a position that is a product of the academic hierarchy in my area.
Since I've entered graduate school, I have tried to make most of my academic writings to be true to my self, and to my sense of ethics and integrity. (Well prior to that, I journaled a lot and never integrated my academic writing with my personal aspirations.) It has been relatively easy to do so in my field because of the nature of my subject, and because of the type of courses that I chose to take. For the sole reason that my writing has been able to reflect my ethical call and personal integrity, I have always enjoyed writing--despite the rigorous and sometimes tedious process of research and production of writing.
However, knowing that my writings are going to be targets of judgement somehow changed the dynamic of my usual writing experience. Knowing that the essays I was writing are reflections of who I am on paper, and knowing the fact "I" as a whole person will be judged based on these reflections, I was losing my usual enjoyment in those writing processes. I struggle between staying true to myself and trying to present the writing in such way so that the "judges" of my writings will like "me." I even got advice from some experienced pool of these judges--they said that I better change what I've written so that they can hear what they want to hear.
Putting down my struggles proves them to be absolutely absurd--if we measure absurdity by reason. In the meantime, those struggles were also fruitful in the sense that I was forced to learn to hold the tension between my integrity and others (the judges) expectation of my reflection. The hardest part is perhaps my struggle through time, the fluidity of evolution of self that I hope to convey but was not able to capture quite like I would have liked to.
In the end, perhaps something is better left unsaid;
in the end, perhaps something is better left out for interpretation;
and in the end, perhaps writing is about inscribing, erasing, re-inscribing, interpreting, and reinterpreting...
As much as the writings, as a reflections of self, are judged,
the process of taking up the challenge of writing to be judged, may well be a reliable source of indicator for those future judgments.
In my view, transformation of self occurs among these processes, making those judgment a slip of time,
like the point of a finger that indicates the direction instead of the destination.
Glad that I'm finally catching a breath to write, but not to write to be judged. :)
