I’ve been called “dreadfully honest,” and I will wear that label as a badge of honor.
I’ve spent most of my professional career as a university-level writing instructor, studying the theory and practice of literary and academic nonfiction and working closely with young people to help them better express *who they are, what they value, and why other people should care* — abilities which we somehow don't cultivate in their previous 13 years of education before they get to college. Perhaps we don't teach students these things because of the commonsense wisdom which says that the easiest thing to write about, naturally, is yourself. What subject do you know better than yourself, after all?
At first glance, this seems perfectly obvious and sensible advice. But writing about yourself is actually exceedingly difficult. First, if you really look hard at yourself with any kind of edge and honesty, you will likely find all sorts of things that are baffling, things you don’t understand or can’t make cohere, things that are buried or hidden or toxically off-limits, etc. We may know ourselves superficially, but it takes commitment and courage to dig in and discover what is really driving our thoughts, emotions, words, and actions. Second, while talking about yourself might be easy, talking about yourself in a way that will make anyone *else* care is actually pretty hard to do. Talking about ourselves at any length typically slips into one of two rather large containers, and you sound to others as if you are either bragging or whining -- self-serving, in any event -- regardless of your actual intent.
Moreover, there’s a fairly hideous degree of arrogance involved, when you think about it. If I write about myself and share it publicly, I am suggesting that I am *every person*, that I speak for my entire culture if not the the species. Yikes. But thankfully there is this weird, redemptive paradox at work as well: if I make grand, sweeping pronouncements about universals of the human condition in an effort to loop others in, I sound foolish and am easy to dismiss; but if I talk in excruciating detail about the blessed particulars of my individual condition, the resonance and relevance somehow miraculously expands and leaps up for anyone paying attention, and readers/listeners can somehow see themselves in what I am saying about *my* very idiosyncratic experience.
What I am trying to say is that some of my songs — like “Drive,” which I just put up in the Music section, with its backstory in the Video section — are overtly autobiographical and dreadfully honest. But that doesn’t make them any easier to write.