This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose… (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Being told to stop writing

There are few actions as likely to make one realize the importance of something as being commanded to stop doing it. I have blogged, albeit infrequently, in another place for a few years. It mattered hugely to me, and I valued everything I wrote on that site (as, I have heard, did others), for all I struggled to find the time and energy to write as often as I would have liked.

Unlike my professional writing, academic or in a workplace context, in many ways more even than the novel on which I’m working, those articles contained far more of a part of me. Into that writing I poured the anxieties and frustrations of everyday misogyny, homophobia, and toxic masculinity; my academic and pastoral concerns and experience in an educational setting; the conversations I was desperate for the world to be having that no one seemed to be willing to have in my own professional and even personal contexts.

The risks

I always knew that writing of this sort carried risk. I wanted to challenge assumptions and begin dialogue on issues around me, while well aware that some of this carried implicit criticism of my workplace into the public sphere. My desire – indeed need – to write was in conflict with the loyalty demanded of me at work. Even if my readership was small, it only took one misunderstanding, one hostile reader, to cause trouble.

It took months, years in fact, for this to happen, but last month it did. A former colleague (identity unknown) reported me to HR. There were no formal professional consequences, just an agreement to take my writing down, an apology on my part – too one-sided, given the particular issues of workplace sexism the post in question had raised – and some disappointment expressed on my boss’s. In a difficult conversation, I raised the issues of conscience I faced were I not to write about the issues I believed needed public consideration. I was left pondering how they might be expressed differently yet not be silenced going forward.

Continuing to write

None of this could eliminate, however, my deep urge to write. Being required to desist only made the necessity feel greater. And so, more cautiously, perhaps more conscientiously, I begin again, a new name, a new platform, but still the writing that I cannot stem. The only conclusion I have finally been able to accept is that my voice will not be silenced by this. Doubtless I have learned some lessons, perhaps I should also learn some humility, but most of all I have learned something about myself: more than anything, I need to write. From today I will, as Rilke advocates, make my life a sign and witness to this impulse.

Writing truth to power

Anyone who tries to close down writing that they believe implicitly criticizes them is acknowledging that something might be considered wrong in the stance or action they have taken in the situation under discussion. If they firmly believe in their own position, it will hold up in the face of critique and context of debate. I am not willing to concede to the power structures, even in the most localized contexts, that facilitate silence instead of dialogue. It is this that closes down free speech, leaves injustice unchallenged, and leaves minority voices without a platform.

The ‘privileged millennial’

While I do not pretend that there will be nothing on this blog that does not spend its time challenging society, I do promise to try to engage in and provoke conversation about the issues I encounter in the world, from my own limited perspective and experience, that of the so-called ‘privileged millennial’. I fully accept that I am both of those things, but also that it is unhelpful either to accept or dismiss this title as a slur.

My privilege is something that I both wrestle with and strive to use for good. It is also something that only extends so far, and does not eliminate the struggles that people like me face in the world, for all I aim to consider this within context. My generational status has been turned into a term of mockery, but this is something too that I aim to challenge.

The time is now

Millennial identity and the challenges facing a generation deserve proper and respectful attention, but, more than this, millennials’ time is now, and there has never been a more important moment for a generation to step up to its adult responsibilities. So, while sometimes this blog may be light hearted, sometimes it may reflect only a narrow segment of millennial experience, I hope nonetheless that it will offer a voice worth listening to, a worthy interlocutor in the conversations of our time. Never has it felt more urgent to ‘try to say what you see and feel and love and lose’.