On Conditions

an inquiry into nerves, ghosts, directions, and voice

While going through my recent series, I wrote a few questions for future versions of me to use when I write so I don’t have to (hopefully) continue to be told that my voice is missing from my writing.

Here are a few I thought worth sharing that I developed from essays.

• Imagine yourself sitting down to write something that matters to you — a novel, an essay, a term paper, an email, a love letter. Before any words come, do a scan of your body. Where are you holding tension? What is your breathing doing? Your jaw, your shoulders, your chest? Now ask: is your body organized around reaching toward someone, or around protecting itself from something? The difference may shape what you’re able to say before you’ve written a word.

• Think of something you stopped writing. It could have been because you ran out of ideas and further elaboration became unavailable. The willingness to follow a thought further disappeared. Language and description were difficult to obtain. If you could slow that moment down, what was happening beneath your thinking? Was there a felt shift — a heaviness, a blankness, a withdrawal of energy — that preceded the stop?

• Have you ever written something competent that a stranger could have produced? The grammar was correct, the structure sound, but reading it back, you couldn’t find yourself in it. What was at stake in that moment that made pulling away feel safer than revealing your voice on the page?

• Much of writing comes with requirements — templates, rubrics, expected formats, institutional checklists. When you work within those structures, notice the direction of conformity. Are you shaping the requirements around your voice, or reshaping your voice to fit the requirements? What does each feel like in your body? One tends to feel like agency. The other tends to feel like compliance organized around someone else’s criteria.

• Pick a recent paragraph you’ve written. Read it aloud, slowly. Then go through it sentence by sentence and mark the direction. Is this sentence inviting the reader closer — extending trust, offering specificity, risking vulnerability? Is it holding distance — staying general, managing how much gets revealed? Is it pushing away — foreclosing, concluding prematurely, shutting the door before the reader has entered? Mark each sentence with an arrow: toward, steady, or away. The pattern that emerges may tell you something about your autonomic state while writing that your conscious intentions didn’t.

• Look at your writing for places where the language becomes vague, abstract, or reaches for a phrase someone else coined. “It meant a lot to me.” “I learned so much from the experience.” “It was a difficult time.” Vagueness and cliché often function as protective covering. They let you gesture toward something without actually exposing it. Ask yourself: what would the specific version of this sentence say? And when you try to write that version, does your body resist? If specificity feels dangerous, that’s information. Rewrite the sentence with full specificity and pay attention to what shifts your tone on the page.

• Read through a piece of your writing and look for moments where the direction shifts without explanation. Where a sentence reaches toward the reader and the next one retreats, where vulnerability opens and then gets immediately qualified or undercut. “I care deeply about this, but of course that’s just my perspective.” “This experience changed me, though I know others have had it harder.” Now ask: is that push and pull intentional, or is it your nervous system negotiating in real time between the desire to connect and the anticipation of what connection might cost?

• What does your body predict will happen when someone reads your most honest writing? What does your nervous system expect? Where did that expectation come from? And knowing that predictions are educated guesses that update through new experience, what would it take to give your body new evidence that helps your writing?

• Do you know what your voice sounds like? Your voice. Not your English teacher's voice. Not your mother's voice. Not your religion's or your politic’s or your favorite author's or whatever TikTok told you to sound like. Maybe it includes a little of all those things — but it's the thing someone who knows you would recognize without your name attached. If you’re unsure, ask: when was the last time you read something you wrote and thought, yeaaaaah, that’s me?
  
  
  also here is a playlist I made while writing the series that helped me get into that sweet zone of ventral-moving-towards my audience engagement.