Someone sent me a note last week: “Nice you can bare your soul in public every week. Is it self-therapy?” Great question, and a perfect topic for my blog, Theatre of Truth(s).
Why do I write publicly about my life? Am I simply processing my experiences in front of an audience? Am I trying to understand myself in the process? Or am I turning personal thoughts and experiences into something that might speak beyond me?
Many writers, artists, poets, performers, and coaches use their own lives as material. Memory, grief, desire, shame, anger, love, success, failure, and ambivalence have fed creative and reflective work for centuries. The personal may be the starting point, but it rarely remains personal or unaltered. Interpretation takes over.
For me, “baring my soul in public” is not simply about holding a mirror up to myself. As with my art, it’s also about holding a mirror out to others. It begins with something I have lived, observed, questioned, or simply thought about. But once I shape it into a story and place it in public, it’s no longer only about me.
A reader may recognize themselves in it. Another may not. Someone else may feel triggered, even when the story is not about them at all. That is the strange power of a mirror. It does not tell us what to see. It simply returns an image, and each person decides what that image means to them, if anything at all.
Perhaps that’s where discomfort enters. We’re accustomed to people curating polished versions of themselves in public: achievements, celebrations, carefully selected photographs. We may be less comfortable when someone speaks openly about doubt, loss, fear, contradiction, or the untidy truths of being human.
Is writing a form of self-therapy? Writing and journaling can help us process experiences, examine emotions, recognize patterns, and make meaning from what has happened to us. For me, the raw and unfiltered parts of my life stay in my journal, not on my blog. That is where the therapeutic processing takes place.
What appears on the blog has already moved into another form. Writing can become reflection, testimony, inquiry, storytelling, art, or an attempt to give form to an experience that might otherwise remain shapeless. Once an experience is shaped into a story and shared publicly, or simply with another person, it becomes something that belongs partly to the other.
Public writing does contain an element of self-examination. In every honest essay, the writer sits alone in a room, across from herself, and peels back yet another layer of the onion. As soon as she opens the door, the reader can enter. They carry their own histories, memories, wounds, beliefs, and judgments. They do not just observe the writer. They encounter themselves.
That, for me, is the deeper purpose of public writing. Not simply to reveal myself, but to offer a mirror. What another person sees in it is no longer mine to control. It may be recognition. Resistance. Irritation. A comfortable or uncomfortable truth.
Reading the note, I could not decide whether it was a compliment, a criticism, a question born of discomfort, or simply a jab wrapped in curiosity. But it did inspire me to write this post.
So I’m curious. As a reader or listener, are you more inclined to understand the other person, relate to their experience, recognize something of yourself in it, or judge them for what they share?
When someone uses their own life as material, what do you see? Is it self-expression, self-examination, art, therapy, or something else?