i love your writing on kink but i often feel like i walked into the wrong classroom and ended up in a math class way beyond my level. you're eroticizing social dynamics that i haven't even put into words until now. how does one gain your powers
Alright, so I get questions like this a lot. I could tell you how I got here, but I think it's a lot more helpful to explain how someone else could most efficiently get here.
A lot of y'all seem to see me as the "cool beauty" type. That's not true, I'm the "can't fucking shut up to save its life" type, which is a lot more charming when you have stuff to say.
So, first, how to talk more. You have to understand that speaking is of no object. If you have a thought, say it. Cut yourself on the wheel of history. If you make a mistake or say something wrong, let yourself learn. Refusing to speak is naive. Inaction will not save you, nor will it improve you, it will only preserve what already is. So, talk. Ramble. Monologue. Engage more. Share your thoughts.
The act of speaking, of converting thought into word, is an action that you learn from. The more you speak, the better you get at turning thought into word. To get good at speaking, you have to talk a lot. This will take many years to reach sufficient skill at, but is a relatively easy skill to accumulate experience with.
Second, how to have things to say. You must understand that you already have a unique perspective, whether you realize it or not. In all likelihood you've been taught to suppress it. To say what others want to hear. The way to improve is to talk to others, to talk to those different to you, to talk to those that are themselves interesting.
And be sure to ask questions. Asking questions is its own art. To ask a deep and effective question is to touch another's soul. You can spend a lifetime on it. To give you a naive starting point, choose a word they said that stood out to you and ask why they said it. This almost always works. Ideally, you'll want to choose either a word that you're not very familiar with or a word they placed a lot of emphasis on. And then, when they answer, try to reword their answer back as a question. Check that you understood them.
This is how you will take their soul as your own. Devour it. Take their most precious elements and pull them from the air and make them your own. Through years of repeating this, you will grow bloated with interesting ideas.
Third and finally, how to have a coherent mass of ideas to say. Structuring your ideas is yet another art. It's difficult and elaborate. Perhaps it can be said to be the supreme act of self, to take the things around you that have made you up and to give order and definition to them. I dislike this argument, for reasons I will not share here, but I respect it.
There are a few routes to this.
You can hold dialogues with yourself. Take varying sides and play the ideas off each other. You can even do this with conversation partners, play devil's advocate or have them help you winnow down ideas, but I think it's most effective with the self. Through this, you'll understand relations between ideas. You'll see how things connect and how they differ. You'll be forced to have more elaborate understandings of underlying concepts, but it will give you a powerful intuition.
You can read theory and learn underlying models from others. This is the most common route and perhaps the easiest. Why build your own mesh when you can borrow from others? Dialectical materialism is very popular here for this, though it's certainly not the only option. There are countless philosophies and models that can grant all your thoughts structure, you need only find them and eat them.
Alternatively, you can build your own practice with your hands and with experience. This is the hardest option but is quite possibly the most effective. Don't just talk and learn and engage with others, do things. Have experiences, try things out, and see the world not as one who watches but as one who does. But, remember to talk about it. Remember to filter your experiences through your own words, and in doing so shift your own words to better convey your experiences.
In any case, however you go about it, with enough time you'll either reach similar conclusions to me, or different conclusions from me. If you reach similar conclusions, it'll have either been because your ideas come from similar roots to mine, or because the ideas are 'correct' insofar as the roots are so deep in "reality" as to be indistinguishable from truth. If your reach different conclusions, that implies something else. Talk to me, and I'll love to hear what you came up with and why.
But, here's a secret: you don't actually need to do step 3. Maybe it feels to you like all your ideas are this bloated contradictory mass, or maybe it feels like you're just dealing with tautological truths without purpose. In either case, you're wrong. By virtue of being "you", your ideas are necessarily granted coherence and mutual relevance. Everything of "you" is connected through being "you", whether you can see it or not.
Of course this means that in the process of sharing, every bias, every ingrained bigotry, every privilege, and every violation is implied in the mass of you. But the only way to change that is to experiment. The only way to learn is by doing, right? So, go.
Say shit and be open to critique and open up to interesting ppl and keep doing that over and over and over and think about it and talk more and over and over. and eventually you'll start looking like you know what you're doing and people will act like you have an innate talent for it.