Why I Chose Anonymity

and why I'm giving it up

I’ve been writing here for nearly six months now, and it’s been a very fruitful creative venture for me. I’m pleasantly surprised that I’ve managed to keep up the weekly posting, and I intend to go on that way. I’ve also greatly enjoyed participating in the community here on this site - I have had some wonderful interactions with people and have read so many interesting things. This is a brilliant corner of the internet. So I feel that now the time has come to draw aside the veil, as it were, and reveal who exactly it is that is behind this blog.

There are many reasons why one might choose to be anonymous, for a short time or as a long-term strategy. One such reason is that there may be certain people in their life that the person wishes to hide their activity from. They may be the people you go to school with. They may be the people you live with. They may be the people who raised you - or claim to have done so.

Particularly if you are an artist, and your creative work is a very private and personal part of your life, subjecting your work to the scrutiny of such Certain People is something you may wish to avoid. This is easier to do online than off. I’ve written about the benefits of being invisible before, and the same concept applies here. Going about your Important Work in secret protects you from people who may want to sabotage you in some way.

Virginia Woolf writes in her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own, a seminal feminist text, about how the ability to have some privacy surrounding one’s creative process is a necessity for art to be produced. Some people appear to have no problem writing in cafés and public places; others need to be totally alone to focus on writing. I am one of the latter.

Woolf cites Jane Austen as an exception to the rule that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”,¹ as she wrote her now-classic novels in one of the common rooms of the house in which she was living, which had people coming and going quite frequently. Austen would cover her manuscripts with blotting paper when she heard someone coming, so they wouldn’t be able to see what she was doing. She liked the door hinges to be un-oiled so she could hear the squeaking of the door as it was being opened. One wonders how Austen managed it without anyone finding out. Maybe people did find out. But nonetheless, she produced extraordinary pieces of writing in this way.

This lack of privacy surrounding women’s writing is one of the reasons why women were unable to publish books for a long time. It’s a poignant thought to imagine how many women there were that could have written literature of the calibre of Austen or the Brontë sisters, but were unable to do so due to their living circumstances.

The cover for the Penguin Classics edition of A Room of One’s Own.

Secrecy is sometimes necessary. Certain aspects of one’s life or identity sometimes need to be concealed for the sake of getting by. But eventually, if one is able to progress internally, there comes a point where this no longer seems so necessary, where the cost of remaining invisible becomes greater than its benefits, and they must take the risk of making themselves known, regardless of what anyone might have to say about it. Such is the place I now find myself.

So, without further ado - allow me to introduce myself.

Hello. My name is Jack Bishop, I am 23 years old, and I am a writer and musician from the UK. I’m recently out of university, and I started this Substack late last year as a way to keep up my writing. I graduated in music, completing both a BA in music and an MA in musicology at the University of York, but now I find myself referring to myself officially as a writer first. So why, you might ask, did I spend four years studying music?

My face, semi-recently.

Writing and music have been my two main creative avenues since childhood. As a teenager I started writing songs - a typical response to teenage depression and heartbreak - and I thought I would quite like to be a singer-songwriter. It was the perfect way to combine the two. That became my path for several years. I even recorded a collection of songs I had written for my final-year project at university. The problem was, I hated the process of actually doing it.

I wrote some songs, but not very many, considering how long I had spent thinking of myself as a songwriter. When you’re cutting your teeth at something, you have to do it a lot. You have to fail a lot, keep going, and you get better. To use an example, Kate Bush wrote close to 100 songs before she made her first album. I just wasn’t up for it with songwriting. I found the whole ordeal extremely uncomfortable and anxiety-producing. Singing especially. Talking can be difficult on its own; singing is like talking twice as loud.

I didn’t (and still don’t) have the ability to let myself be free to experiment, fail, and make a fool of myself - which is, of course, necessary - in this medium I was working in, because of one main thing: I find it difficult to make a lot of noise. Some of us are like this. The Quiet Ones. Let’s not go into why for now, but I struggle with being heard in general. When you’re writing songs in your bedroom, people can hear what you’re doing through the walls. When you’re writing poetry or stories, no-one has to see it unless you let them.

So what else was I doing during those years? Well, as it happens, I was doing a lot of writing.

As a university student I started to pursue an interest in academic writing, and after the completion of my undergraduate degree I took a course in musicology which consisted of essay-based writing. I was also writing poetry during this time. These things can sneak up on you sometimes. Turns out I was becoming a writer all along.

I still consider myself a musician as well, of course. Music is a joy. But I would rather sing in a choir or be in a band than get up on a stage by myself and sing my own songs that I had written in front of other people in public. Songwriting wasn’t enjoyable for me. I love it when other people do it, but whatever it is that enables them to do it, I don’t have. I may return to it eventually, but for now I have come to terms with this. Writing is the thing I am better at, and which I enjoy much more.

A photo I took on a recent trip to Manchester, in the *whispers* gay village

So there you are. The mystery solved. I’m sure you were all on the edges of your seats wondering. After this post goes up, I will do the ceremonial changing of my name and retire my pseudonym. Thank you, Life Liver. You served me well.

I suppose I should also say where I got that name from - it’s from a Joanna Newsom song called “Time, as a Symptom”:

stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways

Business as usual from next week. But, dear reader, it’s nice to meet you at last.

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1. in A Room of One’s Own, p. 1.