The other day, I shared a post on why I started Substack: it was born out of a sheer desire to just write whatever the hell I wanted to write about, paying no mind to editor requests, Acceptable Formats, the newest SEO tricks, or company requirements.
I wanted to do something I haven’t done in years (not publicly, anyway): to tell the stories I wanted to tell in the way I wanted them told, regardless of whether anyone read them or not.
I was tired of trying to please the clients, the algorithms, the publications, and the fickle Google bots; I was tired of writing with a goal – to sell, to make someone or something look good, to get a pitch accepted; I was tired of forever censoring myself for others.
And so here I am, writing just for the hell of writing, whether anyone reads it or not, and it’s insanely exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time.
But the overwhelming response that the original post received got me thinking.
What else are we self-censoring, filtering, and editing for others?
Because we all do it.
We redact parts of ourselves on social media; we filter our emotions for others; consciously or unconsciously, we create public personas - and not just on Twitter.
We do it privately, too.
For me, it began at a very young age. My dad, a music history professor and a TV show host, an incredibly charismatic yet eccentric man of a melancholy nature, once told me that only boring people ever got bored.
I was seven, and I found the comment infinitely fascinating.
First, because I never felt bored.
I was a nerdy kid forever lost in my own world of made-up stories, books, imaginary friends and foes, secret languages I invented, and fairytales I wrote myself. Spending summers at my granddad’s small farm, I would go on countless adventures; I would become a fur trapper of the Wild West in the garden, cunningly tracking the comings and goings of alligators and bears (snails and caterpillars), and build fern-leaf frontier forts guarded by loyal armies created of acorns and matchsticks.
In the city, I would read Tolkien and learn Elvish and dig up small holes in the yard, fill them with flower petals and pebbles, cover them with a piece of glass so they looked like jewels, throw some dirt on them, and then hunt for hidden pirate treasures the next day.
So, no, I was never bored.
And, up to that point, I never found anyone or anything boring, because whenever the real world got strange, scary, or a little grey, the imaginary one would take over, and I’d be off to faraway lands and daredevil antics in my head.
But the way my dad said it – only boring people get bored – told me that being a boring person is a very, very bad thing.
And I didn’t want to be bad.
So, I set out to become as unboring as I could be.
And my dad was the perfect experiment. If I told him about elves or treasures in the yard, or how I thought Ronja, The Robber’s Daughter was brilliant, he’d pat me on the head absent-mindedly and tell me he had to work, or he’d yawn and close the door of his study.
But if, at the age of ten, I quoted Cervantes or offered an opinion that J.S. Bach was an alcoholic? Now I was in business. Dad would laugh, or he would sit down with me and suggest I read some Ray Bradbury next, or tell me stories about his favorite composers, or simply look at me with a little bit of fascination.
It was much the same with my mom; an ex-ballerina turned choreographer, she stuck me in a tutu and tried to make me dance, but I found the entire enterprise disturbing - I didn’t want to do ballet, I wanted to ride horses and travel to Patagonia with Jules Verne.
Yet, whenever she saw my skinned knees and filthy shorts, she’d get upset and sigh in a very tragic manner, and she’d ask why I couldn’t be like Little Joanna instead, the girl next door who did ballet and did wear nice dresses, and played with dolls and was always ever so dainty and polite.
And so, I’d obediently brush the hair of my Barbie (although I never got the point of Barbies, either – they had to be kept on a shelf, looking pretty and polished, whereas a Raggedy Ann my grandmother made for me out of an old sock and some wool yarn could join me on the expedition to find dragonflies in the pond reeds and get muddy and scruffy and still smile), and I would put on the much-hated tutu sometimes, and I would wear neat braids and pretend I loved the Lego set for a Barbie house, although I’d still attempt to build a fort or a castle out of it when mom wasn’t around.
I learned a whole slew of tricks like that – and not just for my parents.
In high school, I learned that big thick glasses, obsessive reading, and Buddhism were lame, so I got contact lenses, wore a leather coat, drank wine, took up smoking, and read Nietzsche instead while listening to Nirvana.
By my early twenties, I’d become a show pony – for my dad, my high school classmates, my first boyfriends… and somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that that’s all I am—a show pony, and it’d better perform, or else.
Or else no one would be interested in the slightest. Or else I wouldn’t be loved. Or else, I wouldn’t belong.
And so the world became a filter through which I saw myself, and the filter began to matter more than what was inside - and that’s before Instagram was even a concept, folks.
Thanks to my best efforts to justify my existence in this world and earn my place under the sun – if I wasn’t interesting enough, smart enough, productive enough, creative enough, beautiful enough, talented enough, cool enough, then, naturally, I didn’t have the right to be here at all – by my early thirties, I had zero self-esteem, an impressive collection of antidepressants, a messy history of failed relationships, and some really, really bad tattoos.
Don’t get me wrong, not everything I did or said was for someone else. I did hitchhike across Europe and journaled and studied philosophy, and moved to England to work in hunting yards for a year, and ran a horse shelter, and studied international relations and became a journalist and worked in newsrooms, and made amazing friends, and eventually left for South America, and lived off my bike for a decade, and built a freelance business, and refused to marry the wrong guy, and enjoyed the hell out of life and people and connections and this big blue world.
But it took some serious inner work, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, serendipitous encounters, plenty of travel, painful lessons, magic mushrooms, and the Grateful Dead to get to a place where I could tell that insecure, ever-self-doubting show pony to f*ck right off (cue in Smeagol telling Gollum to go away, and never come back!).
Because it hasn’t done me any favors. It beat me down, told me to get in line, put on the tutu and dance – and I’m so done with that.
That’s not to say the inner censor has vanished forever; I wish. I still catch myself putting on a show for people I barely know, I still spiral into anxiety loops when pitching a new client, I still doubt whether my work is up to scratch or whether I’m entertaining enough when I lead tours, and whenever I’m lining up at the start line of a rally race or face a ridiculously steep Hill of Doom on a dirt bike, I’m often thoroughly convinced that I’m going to die in a very stupid way in one, two, …
But then, I don’t.
I might crash or go at it slower than others, but I get there. I might overthink things, but I get them done. I might be too much and over the top, under the influence or over the limit, hideously reclusive some days and absurdly gregarious on others, but I have the best of friends. I haven’t won the Pulitzer Prize or a place on the podium of any rally race, but I do freelance for BBC Travel, and Lucy the Bike is still alive and kicking, against all odds.
The more show pony layers I shed, the calmer I feel inside. More sure-footed. More grounded – and joyfully irreverent.
Kinder, to myself and others around me.
And my dad? We now travel together once a year, and we talk about it all – Ronja, Cervantes, Bach, and motorcycles, and we drink Spanish rioja and giggle together, reminiscing. He wants to go to Havana again. I can’t wait to see him at one of his concerts back home, someday.
There’s still work to be done; I don’t think it ever ends.
But it feels like I’m on the right track.
I hope you are, too, whatever that means for you.
Image: rtwPaul
Thank you for sharing these thoughts. I think, the world is full of show ponies and my guess is that there is an overweight of females in the group. In the quest for love and acceptance, it is so easy to loose your foothold and not even notice as it happens bit by bit. Then one day, you wake up with a funny feeling of unrest inside and start questioning what you have become.
I’ll just sum it up for you: You’re on the path of self realization. And that’s an absolutely lovely place to be. Welcome to the frayed edge of “normality” ;-)