From Kent Rogowski’s statement on his work, Everything I Wish I Could Be:
Everything that I wish I could be is an exploration of language, emotions and the desire to change and improve one’s self. …
I am interested in the larger questions of how we communicate and deal with moments of pain and change and the commonalities of those experiences, as well as, the patterns and contradictions that are often inherent in language, advice and differing philosophies.
What I like about this series is how it straddles the mundane and profound and, in so doing, ingeniously captures its subject(s). It’s like, this commonality of human experiences can give rise to a transcending significance and meaning. At the same time, a move to distill to a “universal truth” can wash out the rich color of discrete experiences, rendering each so ho-hum as to be almost pointless on its own.
Self-help books, I guess, also deal with this tricky duality. Writing solely from one extreme results in tomes of preachy platitudes and hackneyed clichés. (There are a lot of these.) Yet, writing from the other produces works of insufferable navel-gazing and tiresome self-indulgence. (There are a lot of these, too.) I’d posit that neither of these types helps anyone.
