How not to self-express

11 hours worth of bus commute is enough time for an idea for a blog post.. above: inhaling cigarette smoke outside FlixBus stop, New York Midtown

Sharing your self-expression is like inviting someone to your garden. Creating a garden can take time, effort, introspection, and courage, and as the gardener, you may feel a strong sense of identity in whatever you have built. By virtue of your personality and preference for authenticity, you may have even spent a great deal of time in solitude in your garden, so that you can improve it on your own terms, and not anyone else’s. Creating a garden is a raison d’être for gardeners.

Eventually you will have other people besides yourself explore your garden, either up close or from a distance, either through direct invitation or random coincidence. In any case or combination, people will pay attention to what you have created. Many neighbors will appreciate what you have done with brief remarks of praise, and fans of your garden will even choose to walk around it with curiosity towards your creations. Closer friends will no doubt be returning visitors who will not just appreciate your garden in the present moment but will be able to chart your own progress over the course of many months and years and will have a particularly deep understanding of what you have developed. As a proud gardener, you will no doubt enjoy these pleasant visitors’ praise and support, alongside all the engaging conversations you have with them. It is of course awesome to have your efforts appreciated, to have other people take interest in your own gardening.

But it is inevitable that you will host visitors who find your garden alienating. They may not understand the aesthetic choices you have made and may find it emotionally taxing to walk through your absurd space. Harmlessly ignorant of both you and the development of your garden across time, they may never see the value of what you have built in the same way as you, or as your neighbors, fans, or friends. They may express confusion at the thought of being dragged into your space, not really knowing why they were asked to experience it in the first place, and may even regret staying longer than desired. “What a weird gardener, what a weird garden!” they might say benignly.

As a passionate gardener, you may decide to justify yourself and your choices. Having spent enough time in your own garden, and having acquired confidence in your own creations, you may choose to defend yourself against the alienation of these unappreciative visitors. Satisfied with your own authenticity and commitment to your own personal values, you may indeed choose to get defensive and be puzzled by why they don’t understand your creation. As the visitor eventually heads out for the exit, you may even forget to thank the visitor for their time and energy, and instead may want to end the interaction with desperate last words as an attempt to keep the self-perceived worth of your garden intact. After all, the garden is your raison d’être, and if you are not used to hostility, any kind of criticism can be particularly threatening to your being.

What the gardener, although deeply committed to his own authenticity, will have failed to acknowledge is that the visitor’s expression of alienation was authentic and meaningful in its own way. The gardener may be encouraged to ask whether he cares about only his own authenticity, or authenticity for all. If one of the prime motivators of creating a garden, and subsequently inviting people to it, is to be open about your own authenticity, then other people’s alienation towards your garden is just as representative of one’s desire to be authentic, and to be open about their thoughts and feelings. Authenticity can be a trait embodied not just by the self-determination of those gardeners who expect visitors, but the responses of those visitors who take the time to explore those gardens too.

Ardent, egoistic gardeners often end up building a vocabulary of words, thoughts, emotions, experiences, opinions that ends up too personal, and ultimately remains intimately comprehensible only largely by them. This is not a necessarily a bad or even uninteresting phenomenon. A lot of interesting expression can come out of an abundance of confidence in one’s own self. But few people remain so self-isolated to a point where their self-expression does not impact other people’s lives in some manner. Most people’s gardens will impact other people’s lives, and if the gardener fails to realize this, and shuns the sincere objections of these alienated visitors, then the gardener can be accused of not showing empathy towards the feelings, thoughts and opinions of other people. The gardener may never see the value of becoming attuned to other people’s authenticity as he is to his own, and that’s not a good thing man.

Indeed, if you garden too much, too long, too solitarily, you can, alongside ignoring those occasionally alienated visitors in your own garden, fail to visit other people’s gardens and see what they have to offer to you. You can begin to seem or even feel like a cold, obstinate person digging dirt too drudgingly solely for your own self, stuck perennially on your own property, insensitive to everything outside the circumference of your own garden. A universe of ideas, values, thoughts, feelings, and opinions exist besides your own, and it is nice to be curious about what other people have to say and think too, because if they are willing to visit your garden, why can’t you try to visit theirs?

If you’re lucky like me, those alienated visitors will show you compassion and call you out with your best interests in mind. You live and you learn . Gardening in itself is by no means the issue, and as a passionate gardener, I will no doubt keep gardening and expect future visitors, many loving and friendly, but some not as keen. My hope is to interact with all visitors- whether appreciative and prone to alienation- with more empathy, especially if they make an effort and spare time to understand my garden, my self-expression. The goal is not to change my garden for anyone else, nor expect 100% satisfaction from others, nor to win anyone over, but to be able to understand those differences- whether potentially negotiable or eternally irreconcilable- with more grace, kindness, and mutual understanding.