A question that came to me after my last post and that I felt anyone reading that post might ask is: what makes me think I am not the blind person in that story? The answer is, I do not know. I could very well be, from someone else's perspective. I can only think or write or reflect from my own perspective which is necessarily a perspective from somewhere. If I am the blind man catching hold of the elephant's tusk and making sense of the elephant a certain way, that's the only way available to me. I like to think that before I judge the elephant to be a certain type of way, I am trying to hold it from different angles and not just one. But there is no way for me to tell that I actually covered all angles. What if I did not get to touch the trunk? All I can do is to try as many angles as possible and when a new angle presents itself, add it to my evaluation. What I cannot do is to step out of this box entirely and watch the blind man and elephant from a different plane. I am in that box and the only position available to me is inside the box, however much I move around. 

It must be rather obvious even if I didn't say so that everything I write on this blog is from my own point of view, not an objective one. The main reason I write this blog is to sort of sift through my thoughts, clarify my own thinking, get to know my own self better, process my emotions, etc etc. I guess none of that would be possible if I wasn't honest/authentic and one risk of being that is that one becomes vulnerable to a lot of charges. On the other hand, I do not believe one can write anything worth writing without some amount of vulnerability. So I must accept what comes with the territory. 

One of the reasons I feel this caveat that this is 'my' point of view might be worth making once in a while is because I am aware my writing voice has a certain absoluteness or confidence in it. It does not perform false humility or contrived uncertainty. A person very dear to me once said to me that I need to learn to 'tone down' my voice for my academic writing. I took that advice seriously (as I did all their advice though they probably never thought so ;)) because in my academic writing I am trying to persuade an audience. It matters if my persuasion techniques work or not. Here, that's not the case. I am just being myself. A big part of my honesty/authenticity here comes from not trying to modulate my voice to suit some audience. I'd rather have no audience than to have to cater to even one. What would be the point of gaining them at the cost of losing myself?  If somebody sticks around, great. If not, that's just as well...