Mask of the Meta Essayist
I’ve been writing personal essays at the behest of my mother, the oomfie-beloved sociomom, and the task has given me both a dull, low-grade anxiety about what my writing is actually worth to people and a deeper understanding of the weaknesses of my prose. Like all of sociomom’s advice, this challenge has been more illuminating than for the practical reason she intended, which in this case was to bolster my reputation as a local writer.
It is a shame, then, that I am a writer of English in a province that isn’t even particularly enthused about reading anything in Tagalog or even the local language, Waray. My follower count on Facebook remains pleasantly low, and it’s just as well. I can’t imagine anything good would come from becoming famous on Facebook of all places.
Writing for an audience of mostly my family and friends has made me acutely aware of my public-facing persona, and in a rather uncomfortable fashion, it has forced me to examine why exactly I am so eager to please the people in my life with my writing. Most of them don’t even read—and they tell me as much! They patronize me by saying my essays give them nosebleeds and headaches, and I know they’re just trying to tell me I’m smart, but I don’t care about that! I’d rather they put in the effort to read my work with the same effort I took writing it, or if they can’t be bothered, then to be honest with themselves and simply abstain from reading it altogether.
I keep writing these essays anyway, out of some vague sense of obligation to my mother and sister and to the few who actually read my work, and out of my own contrarian instinct to write despite the fact that I could probably use my efforts more productively elsewhere. That contrarianism hasn’t given my essays a subversive quality at all; rather, I still write with my friends and family in mind, and I affect the persona of the person they would most love: that eccentric and intellectual boy with a surprisingly sharp tongue when prodded, as unassuming and tricky as a balisong in the hands of a thief.
As you can imagine, putting on that mask causes me a great deal of psychological damage, like getting frenzied in Bloodborne or that other game.
I don’t think that persona is an act, exactly—I’m not that good an actor or liar that I could stop myself from being myself—but it is the least true version of me, or at least the one I find the most personally repellant. It is, after all, a persona that only comes out when I am in the company of men: a sheep in wolves’ clothing.
It’s not a matter of authenticity that’s causing me this distress; again, I am not faking that part of me that I despise. If I am, then what’s the difference between my true self and the impeccable performance of that wretched persona that makes one real and the other false? It might be as simple as wanting to write in a persona that I am most comfortable inhabiting—one where I choose to display freely the parts of myself that I like, to be honest in a way I am usually not in front of others; to write for an audience that understands the vastness of the indefinable self, stripped of its too-short labels and the ill-fitting garment of archetypes.
You might be curious what it is that I even write in my Facebook essays. Well, you’re free to stalk my profile if you’re lucky or resourceful enough to know my Full Name—I set all my essays to public. But that would be embarrassing for the both of us, so for the sake of our peace, I’d rather you didn’t.
I used the Facebook essays as an opportunity to actually try to write like an essayist, instead of whatever the hell I was doing before. Creative writing, even creative nonfiction, isn’t really taught in Philippine schools with the same attention given to journalistic writing: how to write news stories, columns, editorials, features. We are taught to write under the constraints of rigid structures and to adhere to that nebulous quality of journalistic objectivity that often stifles the personal creative voice.
Not that these constraints are bad, but when they’re used in the context of creative writing, they can make the personal feel formulaic. The essays I read from students and teachers often sound like they were written with a checklist in mind—because they are—so they all start to sound alike even when their personal experiences should make their pieces more engaging. (There’s also the matter of half of them being obviously written by chatbots, but hey). It’s a real shame, because I inadvertently keep coming across these and having to read them.
I feel like I fall back on that training more often than not, so I consciously tried to shift to the mindset I have when writing fiction, and I could see that manifest gradually with every essay I wrote. Here’s an excerpt from my latest piece:
The inside of a Bo’s Coffee is exactly like the inside of any given fast-food place, which I should have expected, but the similarities still took my breath away. Plastic and metal furnishings covered in faux-wood laminate, the same for the panels on the walls; if not for the scent of coffee and bread, I half-expected to have waited in line for a Happy Meal. Karma, then, for not going instead to any of the local cafes that would have at least put some personality into their interior design.
It was a Friday afternoon and there were only a handful of people there: a couple of office ladies huddled over a tablet, discussing something so arcanely business-like that my mind tuned out right at the mention of acronyms; a middle-aged white guy with the silhouette of a fridge and his Filipina companion, who displayed saintly patience as he went on a one-sided filibuster about organic farming; and a couple of ladies who were as nosy as I was, daintily darting their gazes away when my eyes caught theirs.
I deliberately wrote a scene like I would in a novel, luxuriating in description (sort of) and avoiding falling back into summary like I so often make the mistake of doing when writing an essay. Avoiding objectivity and strict adherence to fact also helped me to write freely in a way that made the piece more emotionally true… though since I write these essays for my Facebook audience, I hold back quite a lot of what I actually think.
What surprised me most was that by affecting the persona I despised, I ended up writing in a way that was quite true to my frustrations with being perpetually misread by others—the gap between my internal experience and how others perceive me, and my natural reaction of becoming a more externally inscrutable person. It manifested in writing that was, shall we say, duplicitous at best even when entirely factual (for some reason I try to come across as genderless in these essays), but still arriving at an emotional truth I wouldn’t have found by being honest.
I have an idea for a personal essay that I want to write with the more honest version of myself, with the knowledge gained from my more dishonest self. It’s nothing earth-shattering; just some thoughts I have about growing up in my town, spurred by a childhood memory I never could quite forget. It’s a safe topic, but could I be vulnerable enough to arrive at my truth without wearing that obnoxious mask? It would probably make no difference to anyone but me. Still, any effort to better myself is worth doing.