Writing without a filter
I listened to an interview with the Swedish author Lydia Sandgren.
She begins by saying that she threw away all her teenage diaries because they were so awful. "The worst thing was that they were so inauthentic, as if there was a filter over them," she says.
"Congratulations," I say.
I wish that feeling only applied to my teenage years, but that inauthentic filter still haunts me today.
It's as if there's always an underlying vague motive behind my writing, an unspoken and undefinable goal: to be discovered, to be read, to be loved? I don't know, but it feels like every word and sentence is written in the glare of that constant observer – even as I write this.
Is it a language thing, me writing in a language that's not my mother tongue? Maybe. But I don't think so.
All I know is that it feels unclean, and I wish it could be washed away. This feeling, this sense of impurity, lingers like a stain.