That dreadful feeling of anonymisation
I sometimes wonder
whether anybody knows me at all; this is the effect of what I would call
anonymisation. I am wondering whether this happens to all authors after a
length of time, I have 65 books out in the world and I expect a lot of people
know my name by this time but the incredible thing about it is that I still
feel anonymous.
This must be one of
those paradoxes that I have so often read about in the Bible, that in fact no
man is regarded as a prophet in his own land; not that I am claiming to be a
prophet, no sir by no means. But I had thought that I had a certain way with
words and that I could construct a sensible argument and that I could construct
a sentence and a paragraph and indeed a whole book that would make sense.
I think there is a
paradox in doing a lot of writing in that it makes you closer to your audience
but in fact it draws you away at the same time, if you follow the paradoxical
reasonings of the gatekeeper in Macbeth, it pulls you in and shoves you away at
same time.
It would seem that the
more you study people and write about them and think you know them, the further
you are away from them because what the writer has done (and I am sure I am
guilty of a lot of this behaviour) is that in effect you have removed yourself from
the ordinary cut and thrust of society, you have in effect become analytical
and that is a stage above the ordinary way of life that people find themselves
in; the analytical author (of which I am one) is taking a top down view of what
goes on; he or she does not take part in the scrum of melee anymore, one
analyses it from a perspective that has not often been done heretofore.
That is a strange and
very philosophical experience for me, on the one hand I am glad that I am able
to analyse in the way that I do; on the other hand it is very frightening to
feel myself so removed from the run of the mill and so anonymised.
It is a feeling of “You
don’t know who I am?” and I think that’s literally true of me in the modern
times, I have surpassed the slings and arrows of childhood and have suddenly
grown up and passed into a world which I truly do not understand, the world of
the ethereal and the philosophical. What you do with writing and indeed any
creative genre, such as painting, or dance, or opera, or film, is that you move
levels. All of a sudden you find yourself in a space where you did not inhabit
yesterday. You have moved, Dionysus like into a space whereby you can fully
express yourself and you can dance and move like you never did before. This is
the joy of writing and expression but on the other hand it can be a very
frightening experience. What you are discovering in this is that you are
inhabiting a plain of existence which you had not done heretofore and all of a
sudden things make a lot of sense and then on the other hand they don’t make
sense because it is a very alienating thing to happen. One feels that one does
not want to let go of nurse because of fear that one has found something worse.
That something worse of
course is the moving of levels, which is something that my teachers said that I
would never be able to do; lots of employers have said it, the major problems
being told things by these people is that they are often in their own silos. It
is a reflection of them rather than one of me; that is an awful shame. Silo
culture is one in which people are stuck and don’t want to move because they
have reached their own comfort level.
I hadn’t reached my own
comfort level that way and I don’t think it is necessarily good for people to
be happy that they have reached their own comfort level. I think they do it
because they are too frightened to do something else. What we have here is a
lack of people that can push themselves on to new worlds whereby they can think
independently and be the best that they can be.
There are so many
pressures that make sure that this won’t happen, some of which I have written
about in my latest book hysteria within organisations; in the past it was because
employers required people to push paper, now it is based on the number of
emails ad slides for powerpoint that you can produce. All of this is bad or
unhealthy in regard to whichever generation you are judging it in, or
investigating it in.
So however frightening
it is, what we need is the kind of society which will pull people up, will
allow them the propensity to think and to collaborate with others to become
better people, to become better thinkers. We seem to be obsessed with people’s
uniformity at the moment and I feel that this is not the right thing to be.
What marks us out from
the animal kingdom is our ability to think and I would argue that this is
important as we are not going to push the world on unless we think and plan and
try to strive for higher levels. Yes, we must let go of nurse, even if it is in
spite of fear for finding something worse.
Donald Hedges© 2026
Anonymisation.
