Year end reflections

Seven days left in the year, and seventeen posts to go before I hit 100 posts for 2012. It feels odd to be writing to fulfill a quota, "inauthentic." But a goal is a goal, writing requires discipline, and it peeves me to see the total post-count diminishing each year when I look at my blog.

Why have I been writing less? I know I always write less in the summer, when pools of sunshine beckon me outside. I write less during holidays when my schedule is disrupted. I used to write more when I was upset because I would process through writing here as well as in my journal. But that was when fewer people knew about this blog and none of them were the people who upset me. Now I write less when I'm upset or stressed; I process elsewhere.

For over a year, I had all the solitude I could want. Home alone during the day with nothing assigned to me but housework, and even that assigned only by myself, I expected to write and write. But as it turns out, inactivity makes me depressed, and depression makes me inactive. I wrote little and read less.

Now I have two part-time jobs, pet rabbits, and a stay-at-home husband. I have less spare time, but more energy and more ideas, which inclines me to write more. On the other hand, solitude does not fall into my lap. This discourages me from writing.

Over the next week, expect several (I won't promise 17, but that's what I'm aiming for) short posts. I'm "home" in California, which historically has led to me not writing, but this year it feels like a reprieve from so many obligations, and I am determined to catch up, record, process, describe, capture, share: write.

Catchup

Dear Reader,

I have been absent from this blog a long time. Many things have transpired:

O. and I had some huge arguments, settled back down, then finally sought out a counselor. My best friend stayed with us for two weeks, commuting into the city to work at a publishing company. I read a book on attachment theory and another on codependence.

I went to Turkey with O., his parents, my parents, and my sister. We swam in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, we touch marble columns and walked under arches in the ruins of Ephesus, we ate meat every day for two weeks. I picked up more Turkish. I met O.'s grandparents and his cousin and her husband and her two small boys, one of whom had chickenpox.

We came back home. My sister stayed with us for ten days. The girl rabbit was discovered to be a boy. O. and I went camping for a weekend. The anniversary of our wedding arrived, and we watched together a rom-com ("The Holiday") that O. had watched to mend his broken heart when I cut off our friendship three and a half years ago, in the days before our worlds meshed.

I started a part-time job for our church; my title is Communications Coordinator. I sent out some emails. Then I came down with chickenpox and we went to the ER.

And now finally here I am, re-acquainting myself with this blog, with the internet, with writing at all. Normally after a long absence from blogging, I just pick up wherever I am and continue my reacting-to-the-moment blogging. This time, I want to actually write about the things that happened in the past couple months. I feel willing, for the first time, to let this blog be more of a story, a comprehensible narrative, and less of a series of fragments. This time I want to bind the fragments together, and let a whole scene come into view.

This post is going to be the itinerary. I have a lot of things to reflect on and I want to do a lot of the reflecting here, at least one post per paragraph. This is the beginning, or a beginning, since life and reflecting on life seem to require beginning again and again. This is another beginning.

And here we go.

#401

This is my four hundred and first blog post! Considering that I've been with this blog for just about four years now, I suppose it's only reasonable to have stacked up so many posts. Still, it feels like an accomplishment, a significant accumulation, like a pile of autumn leaves large enough to leap into.

Lately I've been thinking about the nature of this internet chronicle of mine. Some of my thoughts are finally enough in order to record and share, and this seems a good occasion. So read on, for some reflection on different sorts of blogs and which sort this one might be.

I have noticed that, when I stumble onto strangers' blogs in the tangled forest of Internet, there are two types that snag my curiosity enough to make me linger. The first type is informative, educational, thought-provoking: the idea-driven blog. In these blogs, it's not important to me who is writing, because the ideas speak for themselves, and their relevance or importance is determined in relation to the world outside, not by their relation to the blog's author(s).

Then there is the second type: the self-disclosing blogs. The story blogs, the personal blogs. The blogs where I get to see the person on the other side of the writing, not just in a snapshot or a statistical analysis, but in an on-going account of life in which I know fairly soon who the main character (the blogger) is: her key relationships, his ideological standpoint, her job, his hobbies, etc. I quickly lose interest in personal blogs that do not make clear the who behind the writing.

My own blog does not fall into either these categories. It is definitely not an idea-centric blog, since I so often write things that take their significance primarily (or entirely) in relation to my personal experience. And while I do often write about events taking place in my heart and soul, I carefully excise most of the eternal references that would root the emotions and meditations in a story. This is largely because I do not want random strangers to know my story. I feel exposed and vulnerable to a person who knows the story-shape of my life, in a way that I do not feel exposed to someone who has seen intimate snapshots of my life but has no larger picture of how those images fit together. The shape of this blog has been largely or entirely determined by what I feel like and want as a writer, with minimal consideration for what readers might want. Does this mean any stranger who stumbles across this blog will abandon it after a few sentences in favor of a more story-centric one?

I suppose those story-centric blogs are like memoirs being written in real-time. Meanwhile, my kind of blog is more like a collection of lyric poems. In reading a memoir, you learn an entire history, the story of how a person came to be. You learn a thousand things about them, though it may be (depending on the memoir) that you gain very little understanding of what it feels like to be that person. On the other hand, in reading someone's poems, you can get to know that person in a very intimate and intuitive way. But you don't know anything about their life, necessarily; what you know is the indefinable, indescribable, invisible pattern of their thoughts and emotions. You carry the imprint of their heart upon your own, and yet you wouldn't recognize the writer if you met him or her on the street.

I would be okay with having hundreds of strangers read a book of my poems. (More than okay: I would be so proud and happy.) But I would not be okay with having hundreds of strangers read a biography of me or a memoir by me (which I will never write). So I guess it only makes sense that my blog has the flavor of a collection of lyric poems, rather than the flavor of a memoir. And that's okay, because there are people out there who read Rilke, if not in the same numbers as people who read Dreams From My Father.

Thanks for reading, and here's to the next 401 posts! :)

Bloggistential Crisis

Lately I have been wondering about purpose. What is this blog for? Is it accomplishing what it should? Should I be doing something different? something better? Ever since reading two or three blogposts about how to make your blog better, get more readers, increase traffic, etc., I have been intermittently paralyzed from blogging, or writing at all, with the perpetual question: is this any good? Will anyone want to read this?

Often I treat this questions like flies, swatting them away without much thought. They are annoying but short-lived. But these are flies that hover around the "New Post" button on blogger, and, as I do with any pest-infested place, I have been avoiding that "New Post" button, and even more, the "Publish" button. This is a problem! I'm not a blogger if I don't blog. I'm not a writer if I don't write. I want to live in my identity as a writer: I need to write. And so I need to face my fears.

I have been noticing more and more that the unexamined fears are the most troublesome. They nip at my heels, they growl at me from behind. They are always behind me, you see, because I never look at them. I studiously avoid eye contact, because in order to look at them, I would have to acknowledge their presence. Unlike wild beasts, these threaten me more by the fact of their presence than by harmful actions they could take against me.

In truth, when I look my fear in its yellow eye, it wilts like a scolded dog. It turns tail and disappears under a car like a stray cat. Simply by acknowledging that I have been afraid, I diminish my fear.

My fear here: I am afraid of being judged and found wanting according to some unwritten standard. I am afraid this blog will be a failure. --But when did I sign a contract subjecting myself to the judgment of the internet? The internet may judge me (most likely by ignoring my existence), but its judgment has no real force in my life. Why am I allowing it to have force in my heart?

The problem is, I have no idea what the purpose/mission/goal/raison-d'etre of this blog is. Or rather, I have several ideas, and sometimes they get along but sometimes they fight each other. Sometimes I think I keep this blog so that people can read my writing. This is scary because what if no one does read it? What if it's always just my parents reading? Sometimes I think I keep it because I write different kinds of things here than I write in a journal or an email. This is less scary. I am the only one I have to satisfy. Other times I think other things. It gets messy in my head and then I just stop writing, for a while. But I come back. I come back because, even though I can't tell you exactly what my purpose in writing here is, I know I have a purpose, or a hundred fragments of purpose, and I also know this blog doesn't have to be a mere means: it can be its own end.

My purpose in keeping this blog is to write, and to write well. Goodness is its own justification, and I don't have to write the best, the most, to write well. So here I am, and here I'll be.