I's and Eyes by Lara Lowinski

Art, Authenticity, and the Weight of External Opinion

Everyone knows the feeling of staring at a blank page, willing something, anything, to appear. Usually, when I write, it is out of pure urgency; words spill out faster than I can catch them. But lately I feel stuck. Mostly because I have started to que

stion the authenticity of my writing and wondered if it is even possible to write something that is truly mine: perhaps this feeling itself is worth writing about, an existential creative crisis. Even as I type, I feel the invisible audience mocking me for dramatizing my own existence, chastising me for daring to make art out of something so mundane. In a way, my mind feels polluted, full of dirt, not in a literal sense, but in the way it has been shaped and infiltrated by the outside world.

Every day, I am a passive consumer of external input. Whether it be the news informing me that the world is in flames or advertisements assuring me that happiness is just one purchase away, all day, I take in stuff with very little space for anything truly personal to grow. I could blame myself for spending hours scrolling through mindless content and submerging myself in a never-ending spectacle of heaven and hell, but even if I turned off the screen, I’d still be absorbing something. The uninterrupted noise of the world never stops pressing in.

How do I know if I think something truly is beautifulor if it is just what I have been conditioned to find that way?

My point is, how can I discern between the ideas that came from within, the ones which have emerged from the source of my being and the ones which have merely been picked up as drift by the stream? How do I know if I think something truly is beautiful or if it is just what I have been conditioned to find that way? Do I hate every poem I write because it sounds like it came from me or because it doesn’t? Can authenticity exist where there is the collective? The paradox is clear: the pursuit of authenticity often feels like the most contrived experience of all. The more I search for myself, the more lost I become. If authenticity is impossible, if every thought, every creative impulse is, at least in part, an echo of external influence, then what does that mean for art? Is my writing truly mine, or just a collage of everything I’ve ever absorbed?

I may be selfish for wanting my work to be personal, for wanting it to come from within rather than to be a mere reflection of the world around me. I often wonder if I should try to de-center myself from my writing, but even the very idea feels unnatural. I am, after all, stuck inside myself. Older generations of writers seemed to do this more easily, untouched by the hyper-individualizing effect of social media, which, at its core, is just a platform for self-insinuation, and almost an art form in itself. Poets like Wordsworth found meaning in a field of daffodils, Keats in the song of a nightingale. Their work revolved around the world outside themselves: seasons changing, a leaf gently making its way to the ground. I, on the other hand, count the number of times I say “I” in a piece and wonder if I should even be writing at all. Is this constant self-exploration really productive if endless introspection usually only ever leads to despair?

Is the key to happiness really breaking up with yourself? If I step outside my own experience, am I not nothing more than a mirror, a vessel for the world to see itself? Philosophers like Hume have argued that we are just a bundle of perceptions, shaped by external forces. But this way of thinking unsettles me. It makes me feel like an effect of a cause rather than a being in my own right. I need there to be a ‘me’ to understand because most of the time, trying to grasp the world outside myself feels like too much to bear.

And so, my struggle with art remains. How can I create outside of the panopticon that has become my mind? How do I write without judging every word before it even meets the page? Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about killing the ego, not obliterating the self, but quieting the constant, self-conscious analysis. The ego may not truly be me, but a reaction to the world, a collection of other people’s expectations, judgments, and projections.

If I step outside my own experience, am I not nothing more than a mirror, a vessel for the world to see itself?

But then, what’s left? If to exist is to interact with the outside world, if no one is immune to the Other, is there anything that is purely my own? The truth is, probably not. The best I can do is document my reaction to the world’s noise: how has my unique experience of this place led me to interpret the world around me? What unique flavour of subjectivity has been bred in my mind, and how has it made me view myself?

In my opinion, the pursuit of untainted, wholly original art is vain. Every thought, every word, every piece of art is laced with something foreign to ourselves. I will never know what my voice sounds like in a chamber of nothingness. But then again, wouldn’t that be a terribly lonely song anyway?