Can I be personal?

I am pleased to learn that a new approach to academic writing and research is being proposed, an approach that takes into account things that until now have been overlooked by scientists and researchers: emotion, participant experience, subjectivity. "I start with my personal life. I pay attention to my physical feelings, thoughts and emotions. I use what I call systemic psychological introspection and emotional recall to try to understand an experience I've lived through," Ellis and Bochner write. “In the writings of certain postmodernists and particularly within feminist and queer theory you see a renewed appreciation for emotion, intuition, personal experience, embodiment and spirituality,” they continue. Of course, it is not easy to be personal, and God forbid you should show your emotions. “[I]f you’re not willing to become a vulnerable observer, then you ought to reconsider doing autoethnography,” Ellis warns.
I like to write short stories, and can see the work facing an autoethnographer. It is not easy to be introspective, to be emotionally invested. It is draining to reveal your soul in writing. It is a very intimate experience that takes a lot of courage but also a lot of psychological work. Writing on this blog - for example - has not been easy for me. Sometimes I am revealing more about myself than I want to. That previous sentence - not to go far - was revealing and also hard to write, but also harder to make public, to share it with a group of people. I can then see how it is that Ellis compares autoethnography to therapy. “Of course, I agree that our stories should have therapeutic value,” Ellis tells.
This hard work, however, can lead to insightful analysis. It can perceive properties of the research until now ignored that can also give more understanding to why and how I (others) do things they way they do it. If in the process, I arrive at a conclusion that helps to better understand my world and then the world of others, then the method has been valuable and useful. There are of course considerations to keep the work “analytical” as pointed out in the article by Ellis and Bochner. It is the challenge: how to include subjective, emotional analysis while at the same time producing objective, unbiased, scientific results. “The article I wrote on stigma convinced me of the benefits of moving between narrative and categorical knowledge, though I don’t think that is necessary in every study,” Ellis tells her aspiring student.
I was watching a program about a book called The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, and the author talks about how art, literature, and poetry adds value to society. It might be hard to measure, he says, but they add to society. He ends his interview quoting a sign that was in Einstein’s office that read, "There are some things that count that can't be counted. And some things that can be counted that don't count." His interview resonated with me, and the quote from the Einstein’s sign made me think about the autoethnography article I had read and how it proposed a more intimate personal approach to research and writing. “[I]t will be difficult to wean scholars and the American public from a view that measuring and, comparison and outcomes are all that matters,” Ellis and Bochner conclude. Academics might start to write from the heart and open the “discussion of working the spaces between subjectivity and objectivity, passion and intellect, and autobiography and culture,” they continue. I hope the discussion continues and these new approaches are adapted. I also hope that in the process academic writing becomes less, well, dry.