A comment once left on my blog has stayed with me for a long time. The person wrote, more or less, “I really envy you—you express yourself so well.” At the time, I found that strange. What is there to envy about expressing yourself? Isn’t that something everyone can do?

Later, after moving to Beijing and meeting all kinds of people, I started to think differently.

One of my coworkers in a security job, a man named ZYQ, left a deep impression on me. We met on my very first day. In person, he seemed quick-witted, articulate, socially aware—the kind of person who could hold a conversation smoothly. But later, when we communicated over WeChat about a small matter, the messages he sent were hard to follow. His sentences felt disconnected, and the logic between them was loose. That puzzled me. How could someone who spoke so normally in conversation become so unclear once he switched to writing?

Then I remembered a short video that had once become popular online. A young woman, standing in a snowy landscape, smiled at the camera and said:

“This place is beautiful like a painting. I wanted to recite a poem for the world. But alas, I’m not educated enough—so all I can say is, damn, the snow is huge!”

At the time, I only smiled at the joke. But looking back, what made it resonate may have been something deeper: the anxiety ordinary people feel when they cannot express themselves accurately or fully. The fact that so many people related to it suggests this is not just a private frustration. It has become, to some extent, a social one.

With the rise of microblogs and short-video platforms, blogging has long since lost its former glory. Those who still update their blogs today often treat them as places to share technical resources, practical information, or fragments of daily life. Blogs that genuinely carry independent thought or a sense of human concern have become rare. Many blogs update less and less frequently; some sit untouched for a month or two at a time.

Even though I myself have been updating my blog quite often lately, I still feel conflicted whenever I sit down in front of the screen to write—especially when my thoughts have not yet taken shape. Sometimes I do not even know how to begin. That uncertainty brings with it a faint anxiety. In the end, it comes back to the same thing: I am not fully confident in my own ability to express myself correctly and completely, either.

Because of experiences like these, along with certain news stories I have come across, I have spent a long time thinking about one question: why are we so often unable to express ourselves properly and fully?

What does it mean to “express yourself”?

Before answering that question, it helps to clarify the terms involved: what counts as “expression,” what counts as “full,” and what counts as “correct.”

To me, expressing oneself means being able to present, clearly and with some personal color, the information one receives from the outside world through the senses. It also means being able to perceive one’s inner world and reveal one’s thoughts through action. Even behaviors that seem unconscious can be understood as forms of self-expression. They may appear unintentional, but if we look at them through a psychological lens, there may still be subconscious meaning behind them.

“Full” is easy enough to understand, so I will not dwell on it. What matters more here is “correct.” I do not think expression is correct simply because the person expressing it approves of it. For an expression to be correct, it must not only feel true to oneself but also align with some broadly shared human values.

That may sound abstract, so it is easier to look at concrete examples.

ZYQ, my coworker, became somewhat muddled when he tried to communicate through writing. That is a mild form of failing to express oneself correctly. The woman in the snow, meanwhile, could communicate the feeling, but not in a rich or precise enough way; that is a case of failing to express oneself fully.

For most mentally healthy people, correct expression is usually not the biggest problem. People can say things like “The snow is beautiful,” “I’m hungry,” or “You look like you’re in pain.” Whether the source is the senses or the inner life, whether one is describing oneself or observing others, most people can generally manage basic correct expression. What they often cannot do is express themselves fully.

When expression becomes incorrect

There are, however, situations in which expression is not merely incomplete but wrong. In my view, this usually falls into two broad categories: people whose minds are seriously disordered, and people whose emotions or psychological state push them into abnormal behavior.

Take parents who hit their children because the children are doing poorly in school. Their underlying feeling may still be love, but beating the child is not a correct expression of that love. There are even more extreme cases: a mother who ties her child to herself and jumps into a river, or Wu Xieyu, who killed his mother in a shocking crime. One may say that such people act out of the belief that a child will suffer in this world, or that a mother’s life is full of misery—but even if their inner motive contains fear or concern, what they ultimately do is kill the very person they claim to care about. In such cases, the expression may be intense, even total, but it is by no means correct.

The arts world has its own examples of full but incorrect expression. The wave of so-called “ugly calligraphy” that spread widely online a few years ago is one such case.

Ordinary people will not usually do things so shocking or so clearly at odds with ethics. Yet in daily life—in something as ordinary as trying to write a blog post—we still often find ourselves unable to express ourselves correctly or fully. Why?

Why expression fails in ordinary life

One reason, I think, is that even though human beings are highly intelligent creatures, we do not produce thoughts every moment of every day. The mind has blank periods, such as sleep. It has periods of passive reception, when we are merely taking things in. It also has periods of comfort and enjoyment, when we are not especially driven to reflect.

Another possibility is that we do have thoughts, but we fail to record them in time. If a thought is not captured when it appears, it may fade before it ever reaches expression.

There is also the problem of dullness. We may not be enthusiastic enough about life. We may no longer stay sensitive to the outside world we encounter. We may not understand our own emotions or inner movements well enough.

And even if all of those conditions are met, expression can still fall short if our cultural or linguistic ability is limited. If we cannot use language—emotionally and rationally—to accurately convey what we have seen, heard, and understood, then our inner experience will remain blurry to others. Even borrowing existing language, such as lines, lyrics, or quotations, requires a certain level of familiarity and skill.

There is another possibility too: perhaps we simply have not found the mode of expression that suits us.

Maybe you do not actually like writing, and are not good at it either, but because you admire people who can write, you imitate them awkwardly. In that case, it is no surprise that you cannot express yourself correctly or fully on the page. If you changed tracks—if you tried singing, dancing, or running, for example—you might find a form in which expression comes much more naturally. But even then, expression is not effortless. You still need repeated practice until that expressive skill becomes something you truly command.

On top of all this, unstable emotions, indulgence, and plain laziness can also get in the way. Sometimes the obstacle is not that we have nothing to say, but that we are too scattered, too comfort-seeking, or too unwilling to work through the difficulty of saying it well.

That may be why clear self-expression seems simple from a distance, yet proves so hard in practice. Most people can say something. Far fewer can say exactly what they mean, in the right way, and with enough depth to do justice to what they have truly felt.