I’m scared, to share with you, documents of my imperfection and ignorance.

It’s one thing when the world needs to hear your voice. It’s another when the world has heard more than enough.

Not that I am them, the white guys responsible for this mess, but I am. And if not by blood, by something even stronger: privilege. An Oedipal snafu: I am born of it and wed to it, and I am destined to father it. And, like Oedipus, knowledge cannot change this future, which has been chained to history. But what good would it do to gouge my eyes out? Even a child knows that the world doesn’t disappear just because they put a hand over their face.

The point is, I’m prone to seeing the world like a white guy, the Moirai have made their decree. And my journal, because it contains mostly the un-germinated seeds of these observations, is naturally going to reflect the perspective which my privilege affords me, the truths of which are not always apparent to me at first: a matter that justifies the revelatory poesies of writing (which, I see as different from journaling: last I checked, the painter doesn’t frame the palette where they mix their pigments––although, I’m sure someone has, and certainly not in the name of beauty). As a private space, my journal is a safe place to confront these many weaknesses and limits of my self. It is the silence that the privilege of voice demands. This reflexive activity situates my journal as a secluded document provoking serious self-inquiry. Through explorations of these observations, tainted and sincere, I hope to strengthen my fellowship with other humans and add to the beauty of the world. None of which will ever change the Oracle’s prophecy: the fact that my life, my person, my self, my identity, are shaped by a wave of tidal privilege that often overshadows my individual existence. First-world, white-guy problems, I know. Still, I’m scared.