The Fear Of Being Too Boring Or Too Strange

Welcome back, regulars!
And if you’re a first-time reader, it’s great to have you here!

This is the 4th edition of Think About It. If you missed the last issue where I discussed Kahlil Gibran’s profound quote on beauty, you can read it here.

This time, it’s Fernando Pessoa.

On the whole, this may sound melancholic. But hold on, I promise you there’s more to it than it seems.

I mean, that’s the point of this newsletter—to uncover meanings that are not so obvious.

So, let’s think about it…

A little background info before we get to the quote, just to make you aware of the context and help you understand it better.

The Book of Disquiet is not a usual book.

If you google “what kind of book is the book of disquiet?”, then you will see that it comes under three genres - Novel, biography, and autobiography.

And Wikipedia states that it’s a “fragmentary lifetime project”, which Fernando Pessoa left unedited and introduced as a “factless autobiography”.

It’s certainly not an easy read. And it’s certainly not a book that you can just start reading and finish just for the sake of it.

You’ll often feel that Pessoa is whispering thoughts you didn’t know you had until you read them.

It often feels like you’re reading his diary or journal. If he were alive today, then it’s likely that this is what you’d find on his smartphone’s notes app.

Now, back to the quote.

Pessoa opens up with a brutal question:

He is questioning the whole point of sharing confessions.

By confessions, he means his innermost thoughts, feelings, or experiences. He’s asking: Why bother telling others about your deepest thoughts and feelings? What good would it do?

He's questioning the very purpose of laying oneself bare.

He doesn't seem to believe that revealing his inner world will lead to anything positive or productive. Why?

He reveals the reason in what he writes next:

He presents a dilemma here: the things we experience are either universal (everyone goes through them) or completely unique to us.

He argues:
If something happens to everyone, it feels unoriginal.
If something happens only to you, it feels alienating and hard to communicate.

So, he’s trapped between:
“No one needs to hear this”, and “No one will understand this.”

He's setting up a logical trap for himself (and for us). This is his core argument regarding why confessing anything is pointless. And this is why it feels melancholic.

Yet it feels relatable because we often find ourselves having the same internal battle.

The loneliness of being too ordinary to matter, or too unusual to be understood.

Now, you can argue why our confessions—whatever they may be—need to be original, and why it’s pointless to share them if they are not unique.

Also, this is contrary to what other renowned authors have written.

Consider what James Baldwin says, for instance:

So, someone confessed in the past. They wrote. Bleeded on page. That’s the decision they made.

That’s why we can ‘read’ those confessions. And in doing so, we relate to them. We feel that our feelings—both positive and negative—are not unique to us.

And that’s what makes us feel less alone.

Pessoa, however, also chose to write (confess) in spite of his own arguments. But he says he's doing so for himself. 

So, primarily, he did not write to communicate his thoughts (or confessions). He didn't even hope that someone would understand.

He simply did it to lessen the intensity of his emotions, like releasing pressure from a boiling pot.

It was a self-soothing mechanism for him, a therapeutic act to alleviate his own internal discomfort.

The "fever of feeling" implies that emotions are a burden, almost like a sickness, that needs to be brought down. And writing allowed him to do so.

And that, I believe, is so liberating.

There are at least three things we can learn from this:

• Writing as self-therapy, not just communication: We don’t need an audience to benefit from expressing ourselves.

• Embrace the universal (confessions) without cynicism: Yes, pain and suffering are universal, but that doesn’t make yours cliché.

• The paradox of going through unique feelings: When we feel that what we’re going through is unique, and when we express it, it won’t be understood. But then others feel the same. So, weirdly, somehow we are not alone.

As always, I’ll leave you with a couple of questions to think about before wrapping up:

Do you think Pessoa is being overly pessimistic, or is he being painfully honest?

Do you think we can feel less lonely just by expressing whatever we feel, whether it’s unique or universal?

That’s all for this week. I hope it was worth your time.

We will meet again next week.

Until then
Stay curious

Zaid

PS: If you think someone you know would benefit from this newsletter then I urge you to forward it to them :)