Emily Hoeven| An ordinary mind on an ordinary day

Growing Pains | Why we can’t forget the importance of monologue

By Emily Hoeven 11/14/16 11:21pm

This past week has objectively been full of intense emotional and mental turmoil. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my newsfeed so consistently full of such long statuses written by so many people. After a while, it got to the point where I couldn’t read the statuses anymore, couldn’t log onto Facebook, because I literally felt like my brain was oversaturated. The reactions just kept pouring in and mingling with my own reaction and reactions to other people’s reactions until I could no longer tell which was which.

I sat down with my journal one night to try and sort through all the different thoughts that were running through my head. My thoughts were so intertwined that I would be in the middle of expressing one thought, then suddenly find myself writing about an entirely different thing that I hadn’t even consciously realized was affecting me. When I finished getting everything out, the result was multiple pages of partially unfinished sentences and incoherent transitions between paragraphs. Although it doubtlessly would not have made any sense to anyone else, it made sense to me. I could follow my own line of thinking and find the connections between all of the different things I had written about. What I had traced out was essentially a map of all of my intertwined, confusing, contradictory, complex thoughts and emotions.

Something good that has come out of this election cycle is that so many people have used written statuses to work through and articulate all of their varied emotions. There is often no better way to process the complexities of a particular reaction or experience than to express them in writing. Yet what this election — and my ensuing several-hour brain dump in my journal — have made me think about is the fact that we don’t normally take the time to sit down with our computers or our notebooks and map out all of the things that are going on in our heads.

There is no doubt that the election and the terrible chain of hate crimes that have been taking place across the country — that have affected many students on this campus — have created a highly charged atmosphere of profound anxiety, fear, uncertainty and sadness. In a time like this, it makes sense that many people would be more conscious of what they are feeling, would be articulating those feelings across different platforms, would be trying to work through the innumerable interconnected threads of their thoughts and emotions.

Yet while recognizing this, we cannot forget that our everyday lives are also ones of extreme complexity. In her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf writes polemically, “Examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” The irony is, of course, that an ordinary mind on an ordinary day is no ordinary thing at all. Have you ever thought about how many thoughts you have on a given day? How many different, subtle gradations of emotion you feel? How many daydreams you swing in and out of? How you oscillate between thinking about what you’re going to eat next or what homework you have left to do to thinking about your personal future and the futures of the country and the world?

It’s crazy to think that if we were able to remember every single thought that goes through our head in a day, we’d probably have enough material for a short novel.

We owe it to our complex selves to explore our complex selves. Instead of just funneling the information we learn in class into papers and exams, instead of just funneling our emotions into perfectly crafted status updates, we ought to let ourselves be, once in a while, messy. We ought to take all the myriad things we’re learning, the myriad things we’re feeling, the myriad interactions we have with others, the myriad things we think about and express them in the form they take in our minds. Revel in their complications and complexities and contradictions.

In order to do this, we need to give our private reflections just as much value as we give our public ones. We shouldn’t feel that we have to post a status or share an article on Facebook to prove — or legitimize — whatever it is we’re feeling. Because what we share on Facebook is, to a certain degree, performative. We know that what we post will go before an audience, and what we decide to share and how we share it is inevitably influenced by that fact. The internet cannot and should not be our only outlet for self-expression — because it inherently limits the authenticity and complexity of that self-expression.

We engage in dialogues every day, in class, with our families and friends, on the internet, on social media. The importance and value of these dialogues cannot be stressed enough. But in such a connected world — precisely because we live in such a connected world — we cannot forget the importance of monologue: of talking with ourselves, and, perhaps more importantly, listening to ourselves.