to regain the power to write

when I say “the power to write,” I mean the power to write as a person, not as an academic.

writing is the core of my professional life. I write to teach. I write to do research, and to be recognised for doing it. I also write to survive administratively. writing is how I justify my existence within the institution.

and yet, recently, when I tried to write something just for myself, something as ordinary as a diary, I was shocked by how difficult it felt.

I could not find a beginning. I did not know where to place myself on the page. this struggle is not limited to writing. it mirrors something I have not really been able to share with anyone, not even with people I trust: when I meet new people, even in spaces that are explicitly safe, I cannot talk about myself beyond my academic identity.

I can talk fluently about my research, my field sites, my arguments. I can explain who I am as an anthropologist. what I struggle to do is to speak about who I am as a person, and how my memories, desires, losses, and contradictions have shaped the being who stands in front of them. this is not the same as writing positionality in a journal article or a book chapter - I know how to do that. I have been trained to do that.

I can situate myself methodologically, theoretically, geopolitically. what I am talking about here is something else: a form of sharing that is more intimate, more vulnerable, and more emotionally exposed. a writing that is not accountable to reviewers, disciplines, or citation practices, but accountable only to the self that is doing the writing.

I began receiving formal training in academic writing in the final year of secondary education, the year before GCSEs in the british system. I remember how much I resented those classes back then. they were taught by a retired white male professor in Classics who was, for the most part, kind and patient, except when we failed to write “properly.”

properly, in this context, meant mastering the passive voice. we were repeatedly told that passive constructions were academic, objective, and british. the disappearance of “I” and “we” and “us” was not framed as a stylistic choice, but as an intellectual requirement.

looking back now, I think this may have been the moment when I began to lose the power to write for myself. writing stopped being something that served me, and instead became something that served an image of me - the image of a well educated student; the image of someone who had been "properly" trained.

this erasure of “I/us/we” was presented as neutral, but it was profoundly formative. even later, when I moved on to sixth form and started taking sociology and anthropology classes (where writing in the first person was allowed again), something had already shifted. I could write the "I" analytically, but I could not write myself. and as I moved from sixth former to undergraduate, from phd candidate to researcher and educator, this distance only widened.

I do acknowledge that my writing makes me grow. it allows me to reflect, to examine my positionality, and to ground myself intellectually. it also allows me to exist materially, to be recognised as a researcher, and to support myself socially and financially. but these texts were always about a projected version of me, and rarely me as a person.

if I am allowed to say this, and I am allowing myself to say it, I blame academia for this loss, because the forms of writing that would allow me to be fully present as myself are structurally unsanctioned.

they do not count.

they do not accumulate value.

they do not grant legitimacy.

we like to imagine education as a ladder, where we move upward by gaining deeper and broader knowledge. but we rarely ask what is lost in that ascent. the pursuit of knowledge has never been a liberal or neutral process. it demands alignment with regimes of authority that define what counts as knowledge, how it should be expressed, and who is allowed to speak. these regimes feed us their values, certify us through systems they designed, and reward us when we write, speak, and think in ways they recognise.

paradoxically, the more knowledge we acquire, the more articulate we become about identity, structure, power, and difference. and yet, I find myself wondering whether the self that I can so eloquently articulate is actually me. whether the ways I have learned to write are faithful to my lived experience, or whether they have slowly trained me to speak about myself only through acceptable abstractions.

to regain the power to write, then, is to reclaim a space where writing does not have to perform, justify, or translate itself into legitimacy. is to write without knowing where the writing will go, and to let writing be a place where uncertainty, contradiction, grief, and desire can coexist without being disciplined into coherence. it is about acknowledging that some parts of the self have been trained into silence, and that writing can be a slow, fragile practice of listening for them again.

this matters to me not only as a person, but also because of who I am within academia. as someone who teaches, supervises, and evaluates others, I am implicated in the very structures that once taught me to disappear from my own writing. I do not know yet what this form of writing will look like, or where it belongs. maybe it does not belong anywhere recognisable. maybe it is not meant to be shared, or maybe it is. but for now, it is enough for me to name the loss, to insist that it matters, and to insist that writing can once again be a way of being with myself, not only a way of being seen by others.