My writing is best described as ruminations on whatever calls out to me, feels compelling, or lingers in my cells longer than my day’s coffee.1
I don’t know who is reading me or why, and what is unique about my writing that has you coming back. I find it so hard to imagine a real-world reader archetype, that I haven’t bothered with an audience-building or distribution strategy for my writing. The farthest I can go in envisioning an audience is by acknowledging you, here, in these sentences, in the second person. (Hey there, yes, you.)
Not knowing what I am writing on, or whom I was writing for, throws up some questions. Why am I writing? And why am I publishing?
Recently I had a revelation. The problem wasn’t figuring out whom I was writing for. The problem was making sense of writing for you, an audience.
I’m not the kind of writer who has advice to give. On most days, I’m drowning in advice I refuse to take from myself. I continue to lose precious minutes of a life I will only live once on…wait for it… celebrity “news” on Instagram. Runner Malavika is in an almost daily battle with Foodie Malavika about whether today is the day to snack on that lip-smacking samosa. And I still haven’t cracked whether news is essential to my daily diet. Unsurprisingly, my essays seldom make calls to action, and rarely have lessons to offer.
It’s only once I turned 30 that I realised how new it felt to do things for my self. To honour myself for the sake of it. To just do good by my own book. Something I just did not know how to do when I was younger.
The only narrative arc that makes sense of these thirty years is the one about giving up on narrative arcs. I used to live in a set of boxes, labelled with little nouns and big adjectives. I was all too happy to assume any one identity – the one that got the greatest social approval – and shed all other aspects of my being. A Runner not a Samosa Lover. A Lawyer not a Creative. It worked too, because it was easy. Being an all-star performer of the part of a hyper-functional, “sorted” adult who’d figured it all out relieved me of the burden to work with my emotions or to rethink the social scripts that were puppeteering me.
Over time and a few spiritual awakenings, I have peeled away the layers of my conscious, predictable, dependable, social-approval-seeking self to discover my unconscious and unknown selves…2
These unconscious selves were like forgotten parts of myself in some cases, but completely unknown parts of myself in others. I’ve learned to connect with them with self-understanding and trust, and as it turns out… those boxes have broken away. The little nouns and big adjectives are now just heaps of letters full of potential. I sometimes play Scrabble with them to find other nouns and adjectives that feel good and fun, not easy and socially approved. I mean what could be better than being a Lawyer and Creative and a Runner and a Samosa Lover and then some?
All this to say, I’m so wrapped up in trying to get to know all of me, that I am hardly able to write for anyone other than me.
What I want to do is write with an audience. With you, the second person, wherever you are, whenever you are.
I want to get to know myself with you, through you. In exposure to other scenes than the one I find myself in now. In conversation with people outside my geographic and temporal slice of life. In performance to new audiences. In self-delusion in uncharted ways.
Reframing ‘writing for an audience’ as ‘writing with an audience’ felt like the missing puzzle piece in my writing!3
A piece that fit so snugly to complete the rest of the puzzle because it brought to my writing my worldview for living: that all reality is co-created.
What I mean by this is that you and I make our reality together, through our acts.
Now that may seems obvious. Of course, we human beings act and create our realities — we think, and have volition, and make and move to create the world in our vision.
What’s not obvious is that everything else also acts. Even all that is non-human — our bodies, the tool we use to act, or the free market, the site in which we act.
The way I see it is that we are actors, and so are our bodies, the market, and other systems. It’s only a question of whether you choose to see the ways in which they act, in response to the ways in which we act.
No model of the ecosystem that works for humanity can view its components as mere objects. Think enslavement, the environment, or the earth itself. Each time we have tried to dominate other people, the planet or even our own person as if they’re objects – and not actors with a power to shape our reality – we have been worse for the wear.
Even ways of knowing, ways of seeing, and ways of being are co-created. And writing is co-creation in this way.
With my essays, I turn my attention to my world and put pen to paper (fine, I lie, but clacking keys onto a screen sounds clunky). In that process, what emerges and unfolds are reflections and emotions that even I don’t know are within me.
You may be setting out on your first kayak ride for the season deep in the western hemisphere, or taking out your jackets as the trees turn a flaming-red in the eastern hemisphere, while I sit here in the cool winds of a tropical summer courting a south-Indian monsoon. Yet, when you write to me about your experience of breaking down your own boxes and scattering your own nouns and adjectives for a new round of Scrabble, for a single moment, we co-create a world of our own making.
A world of shared meaning, that we can only be living beyond the boxes offered by life.
I write into existence a world that I create. This world is only partly drawn from the world as it exists in reality, because it happens to so fundamentally be shaped by my way of seeing and being in it.
In turn, you read into existence a whole other world – only partly shaped by the world I create – and otherwise defined by your world and your ways of seeing and being in it.
Doesn’t that make writing the rarest form of world-building?
Something that seems propelled by the kind of travel that defies the time-space-continuum.
The kind of travel that makes community a possibility beyond geography, time, and social contingency.
The kind of travel we need for a moment of shared curiosity. Beyond our boxes, our fixed identities, and our performed selves.
I want to build a strange and unlikely momentary world together with you.
I want to write for me, with you.
If you happen to be here and enjoy reading my essays, please let me know: what would make my writing a worthy investment for you?
Heaps of gratitude to C.A, Rebecca, Eric, Tommy, and Kelly for giving previous drafts of this essay so much thought and love in the form of extraordinary feedback.
From the pause offered by a Bangalore darshini coffee to the gift of losing friends, the muse has been indiscriminate.
Today for instance, it hit me like a ton of bricks that the last few weeks has been a deep regression (or perhaps a progression?) back into my now-absconding-for-10-years nerdy lawyer self. On more than three occasions, I’ve found my head buried in some arcane cases and philosophy textbooks for no apparent reason. At least twice, I’ve got on an old school telephone call with other nerdy friends to ask them what their thinking is on the puzzle currently buzzing in my bones. Yes I hear you, it’s 2023. We don’t read philosophy textbooks or make telephone calls anymore. But it’s also 2023, and my burn out from lawyering is apparently healed, and maybe, it’s time for me to rewrite the narrative that the law to me is just a job. Apparently, it is actually some kind of world-building project that I enjoy, even for play, just as much as I do writing. How’s that for an integration of my shadow selves?
You know when you are in the shower blissful and ready for a hot cleanse after a hike on a humid day, and then the water suddenly stops coming out of the shower head while you wait half-wet, half-sweaty under it, and all you can now do is bathe yourself in the yearning to wash off the day’s dank dustiness while the day’s beauty fades away far behind you? And you know that surge of glory and gratitude, like all is well with the world again, when the water splutters and rumbles its way out onto you after what feels like an eternity? That’s how I felt when this revelation came upon me. Far more dramatic really than finding that lost puzzle piece.
Yes, love the collaborative experience idea between writer and reader. I always appreciate your writing, and I've never really understood the conversation about who writers should write for. The process all seems more mysterious and magical to me than the idea there is a set audience that should be targeted. Writing for me seems to be more an act of surrender. Sometimes I write for me, sometimes for an "audience" of some kind, but what always makes writing interesting to me is that the writer has surrendered themselves to the unfolding of the process. I have greatly appreciated many of your pieces that it seems you would say are self focused. Ironically, I often feel much more involved in such writing, because when any individual really talks about themselves and what makes them human, the tap into human-ness in general, and I'm fully along for the ride. I'm here for wherever you decide to go with the "pen" on any given day. Keep exploring. Loved the Scrabble metaphor by the way.
The articulation of this feeling hits me in this piece. ‘I write into existence a world that I create.’
And even for a little bit we exist together in this space, bound by your words and the craft you are sharing. Thank you for this piece 💕