What moves me

or why I write

I’ve lived my life with few objectives, yet it has been shaped by objective thought.

When I was young I wanted to write. I believed writing could change the world for the better. I set forth with what I now appreciate was an idealistic perspective. It took time to comprehend the complexity that surrounded me. Whether I focused my attention on family or friends, the city I lived in or the global society that shapes it, what I called life was intricate and complicated. Without realising it, my choices created more complexity: my thoughts dulled my feelings as I rationalised my steps.

I remember parties in my early twenties, talking to people who were still relative strangers. I thought they were loved in our community for their creative talent, which I had witnessed. When conversations lagged, I remember a few moments when I claimed I was a writer, although the only writing I actually engaged in was university essays. Art had always seemed like something beyond me, so I revered anyone who spoke of books I hadn’t read or films I hadn’t seen. At no point did I consider that they could be as insecure as I was, or that their opinions might have been attempts to impress the people around us.

I finally developed a consistent writing practice in the wake of a break-up. Again, I was immersed in a community of creatives. Still, I believed I was inferior to all of them. Fortunately, my past claims had become written words. Even if the choice and order of those words lacked meaning to anyone other than me, they were my words. Slowly, I developed skill in arranging these words, which I cultivated through dedicated study, again at a university. Gradually, those words conveyed ambition as I tried to develop a career.

At the time, if you had told me my writing was externally focused, I would have disagreed. I believed my thoughts and opinions were murmurs from my inner world, not echoes of my past. What I thought were meaningful insights were, in truth, my past self trying to speak. My writing was composed of emotions I was yet to understand. In trying to share wisdom, I was really sharing repressed pain.

I was offered a lifeline by my friend Josh. I was travelling more and more, collaborating with indigenous communities and frontline activists on storytelling projects. My primary source of income was a job in a bookshop, while the storytelling offered learning and purpose. Josh had worked in marketing, and in a past life, so had I. He suggested I try copywriting. It was a role I had briefly and reluctantly stepped into years prior. When I started developing a consistent writing practice, I naively vowed to not sully my creative energy, so I chose to work in retail instead. Josh reasoned copywriting would offer the flexibility I needed to travel. While that proved true, more importantly, it slowly extricated me from the knots of self-expression by understanding the communication challenges of others.

It took time for the copywriting work to find me, but eventually I was immersed in the reasons and needs of humans to communicate. More often than not, it was to earn money, exemplifying how capitalism defines people’s perception of self and their surrounds. My clients typically wondered how to best explain who they are and what they do. I absorbed many stories of how someone came to a particular job or focus, what motivated them, what they believed in. Sometimes our conversations would drift to the state of the world, how they were disillusioned when they considered the future, how they felt their life lacked meaning and didn’t contribute to the wellbeing of others or our Earth. As I focused my attention on their words, I could feel the emotion contained within them. I would slowly observe the particular blocks they were experiencing and offer questions or suggestions that may spark a breakthrough.

Through this work, I agreed to an ongoing contract to lead content for a European environmental consultancy, eco-nnect. This enabled me to combine my writing with my collaborations with indigenous communities and frontline activists, as well as commissioning and editing the stories of others, which attuned me to how they tried to articulate their experiences.

I republished most of my stories on this Substack to ensure they could still be accessed if eco-nnect’s website ever disappeared. While I occasionally explored topics like the World Economic Forum, deep sea mining and mezcal, the majority of my writing was focused through other people’s worldviews. This approach grew from my copywriting work, as well as my collaborations with Thunghutti and Bundjalung man Warren Roberts, who taught me that storytelling is a relational practice. The storytelling traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples precipitated my understanding of how subjective experience shapes and defines perceptions of reality, and thus all forms of knowledge.

Despite this deep appreciation of subjectivity, my writing was moving further away from my own thoughts and feelings. After some time, I felt stifled. I wanted to take on bigger projects in my writing and editing — maybe even write a novel. I needed time and space for my writing to evolve, so I stopped working for eco-nnect. Without the carrot of a paycheck or the need to follow a publishing schedule, my writing halted. Bills needed to be paid, so I committed to copywriting jobs, but I reserved a day each week for my words. I still didn’t write. I read. I told myself I was preparing or researching, understanding what was being published. I thought about what I would eat for lunch, for dinner, for breakfast the next day. I started walking more. I still didn’t write.

As weeks and months passed, I noticed patterns. I felt hungry and cooked lunch. I felt tired and made coffee. I felt a pang of loneliness and downloaded a dating app. The sun shone through my kitchen window so I went for a walk. I looked at the time and rushed to buy food for dinner before the shops closed. I checked my bank balance and started looking for a job. Add to this the near-constant notifications on my phone, including the messages from friends wanting to hang out. I realised every thought and feeling was an opportunity to do, to interact with the world, to experience something new. The world around me was beckoning me to connect with it, each yes a move away from my notebook and pen.

All of it was reactive: immediate feeling over creative possibility. I had no clear vision of where my writing could take me; past ambitions had revealed the shadowy places such thoughts would lead.

I asked myself, what am I avoiding?

I was clearly resisting my supposed passion.

I started journalling, a practice I had lost as work and travel disrupted previously defined routines. After some time away from writing, my words felt clunky, lacking meaning beyond documenting the daily life of a 39-year-old man. My first entries focused on the copywriting work I was doing for an AI company. They were followed by feelings that spilled from moments with the woman I was dating. Looking back through these pages, I wince at certain passages, revealing the judgement I often direct at my emotions. With time, more presence emerged in my words, as I unravelled my different points of focus this past year. It inspired a deep and challenging question: what do I want for my life?

I want to let go of who I think I am becoming. I am grateful for the stillness of this current period because I am putting who I am into practice. I want to keep writing to deepen my writing. I feel the time to do so is now, but I am scared. I keep thinking I need to learn more, but why?

I clearly struggle with believing in my creativity, in what emanates from within me. There is a strong part of me that wants to be seen or validated externally, it wants the gratification of now. And then there’s this slower part that takes deep satisfaction from seeing out and seeing through the stories that emerge from within.

Wherever I look, whatever I do, I face the tension between the external and the internal. It reminds me of a yarn, a storytelling circle I was supporting with Warren Roberts on Serrano land in California. A local elder, Peter Shorts, shared a story with his eyes closed. He explained that by closing his eyes, he wouldn’t be distracted by the external, and his voice carried more truth from within. This wisdom touches on the difference between speaking about and speaking from. For most of my life, I have been encouraged to speak about the world around me.

I remember sitting on the carpeted floor of a classroom as a five-year-old, clapping along to “Baa Baa Black Sheep” or calling out the individual letters that formed the word “elephant”. I recall coloured drawings accompanied by a single word labelling what or who I was trying to illustrate. From this early age, I learned to see the world in terms of objects. It continued beyond these first years of schooling, as my teachers passed on knowledge that had been separated and categorised into distinct subjects. The early building blocks of literacy, numeracy, science and the arts expanded in high school to include humanities, French, music, media and theatre. These subjects became lenses of understanding that merged with my personal experiences. I was bullied throughout this time, and one of my teachers told my mum I was speaking up less and less during class. This led me to speak more and more through my writing, as English became one of my favourite and most commended subjects.

Of course I wasn’t aware of how English itself was also sculpting my worldview. I was only just learning how each sentence contains a subject — the focus of everything happening in its immediate vicinity, the sentence itself. More often than not, particularly in declarative sentences, the subject is a noun, a word that names a person, place, idea, state, quality or thing. I won’t elaborate much more — like me, you probably learned all of this in school — but connected to a subject is an object. If the subject is the who or what a sentence is about, the object is the who or what is affected by the subject’s action. Think cause and effect, or someone pushing and someone being pushed, or Baa Baa Black Sheep and their wool.

The structure of English defines the way I see and experience life, yet I learned this language far from its source. I grew up in Melbourne or Narrm, on Wurundjeri Country. Wurundjeri is a word from the Woiwurrung language: wurrun meaning the Manna Gum tree, and djeri the grub that lives by it. Woiwurrung emanated from the people who always lived with the land, plants and animals that I lived with throughout my upbringing. Yet there I was speaking English, a language of my ancestors, who moved to this Country long before me. They left their homelands, and thus I grew as a person disconnected from the Country, people, plants and animals who used their own word, ngalut, to refer to their home, which I then called my “home”.

This historical disconnection echoed the way English nouns separate me from the living processes surrounding me. Now, when people encourage me to be objective or to think objectively — or when they qualify that they are speaking objectively — I don’t believe they are actually referring to a logical reality we all share. It seems to me they’re really speaking in the generalising language of nouns, and that life is not flowing processes but fixed things.

This thinking contrasts with the different perspectives of the indigenous leaders I have been privileged to collaborate with and learn from, who share the understanding that humanity is an intrinsic thread in the web of life. For the past two years, I have supported the work of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, and last November I was at a fundraising event in Rome with the Institute’s founder, Asháninka political and spiritual leader Benki Piyãko. During the event, Benki spoke of how the Asháninka conceptualise wealth: they see it in the forest, the water, the land, the animals, and in all of the living beings that contribute to the cycles that ensure both their survival and their ability to cultivate their traditions. There is no separation between the Asháninka and their environment: nature is their life, the universe is their body and their blood.

It is with this understanding, both in body and mind, that every noun is actually a verb, and the connection between a subject and an object is a being with rather than a doing to. It’s not “I think, therefore I am”, it is “I think and I am”. Miles Davis famously said that “sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself”, and it took me a long time to attune to the sensations and feelings that move through me. It then took time to cultivate this awareness through writing.

In the days before this piece emerged, I was lamenting in my journal how I was not writing daily and how this was necessary to be truly present with my words. As I committed to this presence, my writing began to carry deeper reflections.

What moves me?

In its essence, this question could also be written as why. As in, why did I do that or why do I do anything?

So, what moves me?

Many things. Many feelings. In the past few years, romantic interests have inspired my biggest movements. But if I’m honest, these movements came from something deeper, a desire not to be alone, to not have to look within, to not trust or believe in myself.

These feelings have ultimately been the main drivers of my reaching out, towards objects, to seek objectives, to try to achieve. To take rather than to give. To speak about rather than from. It is easier to be defined by the world-at-large than to learn the unique dialect of my internal terrain. But writing creates a space to discern the movements of my day-to-day experiences, and the more regularly I write, the more aware of them I become. As Joan Didion once wrote, “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.” Writing is never easy, and the prospect of sharing it makes it even more difficult.

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores this tension in his opus, My Struggle, explaining how a novel is conceived in an intimate sphere, and its intimate nature doesn’t change “even if eight thousand copies were printed”, because it is read by only one person at a time. In contrast, when newspapers discussed his writing, Knausgaard felt “there was no longer any connection with the intimate sphere, it was objective and public, detached from the ‘I’”. It had become “a thing”.

This tension is inherent to communication itself. When I speak from my experience and you receive it through yours, something is often missed or lost. The “I” that speaks becomes an object for your interpretation. This tension terrifies me: to write and share from within, only for it to become “a thing” to discuss. It recalls the bullying I experienced as a child, which inspired a deeper connection to writing but also fuelled a fear of exposing what’s within.

It is only now, as I near 40 years old, that I feel comfortable to share in a personal way. My experience of ageing has shaped a belief in the cyclical nature of life: time perpetually moves our world yet it also circles back to emphasise the truth in our being. Focusing on such truths could be defined as objective thinking, yet my particular experiences have expanded my understanding of thoughts and words, of subjects and objects. I am not discussing the nature of language but the nature in language, and thus the nature of “I”, which not only identifies with what moves me but also the very act of movement.

I am a verb.

I am a movement among movements.

And I am not a writer, I am writing.