Finding my voice
Are honesty and consistency mutually exclusive when writing about personal growth?
Call to action: This isn’t a rhetorical question. Once you’ve read this, I’d love to hear how you access and identify your own honest voice - drop a comment below.
Despite always being a relatively introspective person, I’m new to the practice of writing down my thoughts. When, at the start of this year, I first decided to set pen to paper in a personal journal, I promised myself I’d focus on honesty above all else. I hoped that, by journalling my thoughts, I’d deepen my self-knowledge – make it stronger, richer, more consistent. Yet when I flick through my 100 or so entries, I see a bewildering array of voices. Three posts adjacent to each other: one a laundry list of the day’s events, another an existential crisis in ink and the third an exercise of perfect optimism.
How can this be, when each day that I’ve sat down to write I’ve kept my promise?
I’ve thought about my day and then written down the words as they appear in my head – with no real concern about the overall quality of the writing. If I’m being truly honest in my writing (and I honestly think I am), then how can I be so inconsistent from one day to the next?
Truthfully, this hasn’t caused me a great deal of angst. Surely it stands to reason that on some days I’ll be more emotionally available to tap into my ‘inner self’ than on others. Anyway, don’t we see such inconsistency in our daily lives when we project different versions of ‘ourselves’ to people around us depending on the situation. It’s surely not that we don’t have a single self, but simply that we protect our true identities from harm with smoke and mirrors.
But, now that I’ve started writing in the long form I can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right. This is the battleground where I’m supposed to challenge my own thoughts and tackle any words or conclusions that don’t ring true. So surely, if I’m being honest, shouldn’t I be seeing consistency?
I’ve been on Substack for little more than a week, have published the grand total of four blog posts and have two more in my drafts folder. Yet I already find myself questioning if I need to edit my first post. It doesn’t read like the person who is writing this now, and it makes me question whether some of the self-doubt you’ll read there is manufactured as a manipulative cry for attention.
So I ask the question, am I incapable of honest writing, or is committing my honest thoughts to paper somehow changing my self-identity?
The very concept of self-identity is, of course, somewhat wobbly. It doesn’t fully stand up to scrutiny. Where do we find our ‘self’, and what does it look like?
Do we have a soul that exists separate from our body? Is our experiencing self safely nestled somewhere within our prefrontal cortex? Is our Freudian subconscious really pulling the strings? Or are we just NPCs in a computer game, played by a race of super intelligent beings?
Let’s see if we can tackle this philosophically first.
“I think, therefore I am”
(Descartes, 1641)
This is perhaps one of the most recognised - if not fully understood - lines in the history of human thought; right up there with ‘E=MC2’ and ‘illegitimi non carborundum’. This rallying cry of rationalism distilled to its purest form places the weight of existence itself on the shoulders of our ability to think – it’s our capacity for thought alone that proves we exist. It’s extremely tidy as a starting point for a classroom discussion, but does it hold up to scrutiny?
Everyone’s favourite British enlightenment thinker would argue not:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception of other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception…
“…I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in full perpetual flux and movement.”
(Hume, 1739)
I’ll admit that this doesn’t roll off the tongue like the Frenchman’s line, but if we take the time to unpack Hume, all but the most zen among us will recognise an uncomfortable truth. When we examine our ‘inner-self’ what we’re really doing is reflecting on the thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations of the moment, and then benchmarking them against similar ‘perceptions’ that we have stored in our memory.
The only problem with Hume in the modern context is the empirical evidence from the field of psychology that proves the existence of the inner self.
Right?
“The project of charting our inner depths is not merely technically difficult, but fundamentally misconceived; the very idea that our mind contains ‘hidden depths’ is utterly wrong…
“… No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find.”
(Chater, 2018)
Now let’s be clear on one thing, Nick Chater isn’t a crackpot from the online school of Reddit. He is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and – among other accolades - is founder of the same school’s distinguished Behavioural Sciences group. This is a man who has spent a great deal of time trying to understand what makes our inner self tick; a man who has more reason than most to protect the reputation of the behavioural sciences. Yet he is calling for “…a systematic rethink of large parts of psychology, neuroscience and social sciences [and also] a radical shake-up of how each of us thinks about ourselves and those around us.”
At this point I’d like you to take a very short break and really let that sink in.
It’s one thing for an Enlightenment-era philosopher with a penchant for scepticism to question how we perceive ourselves. But here we have a modern-day professor of behavioural sciences effectively telling us that introspection is worthless because there is nothing to find!
The implications for all but the most ardent of hedonists are massive and far reaching. Is there such a thing as personal growth? Can anyone be accountable for their past actions? Do we love our children? Are we simply imagining morality and the social contract as we drift aimlessly through an imagined reality?
Taken at face value, this should be causing moral panic on the streets and a spiral into nihilism: not only have we killed God, but now we are nothing more than spectres blowing in the wind.
Well, not quite. Hume and Chater are both offering valid and serious points, but neither one of them is trying to argue himself out of existence. Hume himself puts it beautifully when he says “Nature is always too strong for principle”, by which he means stop taking yourself so seriously, get out and smell the roses.
It’s patently obvious that we exist with a sense of self.
How can I prove it? Well I first asked myself this question about honesty in writing on Monday, I began writing the post yesterday (Tuesday), and today I’m editing it. I’ve lost consciousness through sleep twice since I first began this trail of thought and yet each time I return to the post, I remember where I left off – and that memory shapes what I write.
We are human beings. Our perceptions are all that we know. As long as these perceptions and experiences remain consistent (no pressure physics), and we’re able to access our memories, our ‘self’ is as real to us as they would be if we carried our soul in a chain around our neck.
“I be, therefore I am”
(Bedford, 2025)
Now I’m not sure about you, dear reader, but I find all of this strangely comforting. We aren’t wallowing in nihilism or overindulging in pure existentialism here. What we’re doing is throwing off any remaining shackles of moral absolutism and laughing in the face of determinism.
This is the realisation that we are an ever-evolving product of the experiences that come before us. Yes, at any given moment, we may be nothing more than the thoughts and feelings that we’re having, but how we interpret those thoughts is influenced by the experiences of our previous selves. And that makes us just as unique, complicated and capable of loyalty and love as ever.
2,500 years after exiting the cave, we finally discover that we can learn more from internalising the shadow puppets than we ever did by dissecting the Forms.
Stepping away from the metaphysical for a moment.
On Monday, I started off with two questions:
Why, last week, did I affect such faux vulnerability in a blog post I’d written for fun and doubted anyone would read. Where was the honesty and who was I trying to impress?
Now that I’m taking my thoughts more seriously, should I edit or delete those first two posts?
I think I’ve got my answers.
When I sat down to write last week that was how I felt. I know I’m not dumb, but I’ve also lived amongst a lot of people who are, perhaps, smarter than me. Historically, I’ve always ‘known my place’ in intellectual discussions. So what I wrote last week was honest – at the time.
However, by breaking the habit of a lifetime and finally tackling my thoughts on the page, I’ve come to realise that maybe I do have something to say - and I can be proud of my voice. Instead of performing a drive-by shooting on my keypad (my first post took me ten minutes), my recent post on Dostoevsky was written, re-written, read, and re-written again - over the course of hours.
I truly loved reading Crime and Punishment and, once I realised how much it was affecting me, I felt I owed it a thoughtful response - and that was honest too.
It’s not that I’ve evolved, grown or changed drastically in the space of a week. It’s simply that my perceptions today are influenced by the fury I feel when reading my earlier posts dredges up memories of the schoolboy who wanted to do better, but didn’t know how to.
Sticking with honesty for a moment, I’m dreading publishing my next post – an almost academic review of my recent readings in Psychology. It’s the kind of writing that the author of my first post would never have had the temerity to attempt. And it’s a voice that my current self worries might scare off the handful of subscribers I’ve managed to accrue (yes, I love the dopamine hit of online validation and I want my thoughts to be discussed by others).
But I’m not going to change anything – I’ll post with pride.
What I wrote in the past and what I’ll write in the future are the sums of my perceptions at any given moment, and what better gift to my future than such an honest accounting of the history of my selves.
“as Bucky Fuller said, “The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events”. NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you’ve got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.” ― Robert Anton Wilson