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Missing you
November 09, 2006
Once upon a time I poured out my heart on these pages. I hunkered down in my room, and I felt the illusion of writing in privacy and silence, and I wrote. I wrote true dirty stories, I wrote my heart out, I wrestled with my brain, my life, my relationships and my sexuality.
I wrote hard and I wrote beautifully, and I did it partly because I couldn’t speak, I was too shy and too embarrassed to wrangle up the words to say these things in person with my own lips to the people I needed to say them to. Better to type them into the ether. Maybe the people who should read these thoughts would - maybe they wouldn’t. Actually if they did - WHEN they did, too little too late - I was embarrassed and it didn’t make me better at talking.
Instead, I channeled my intensity about sex into having it (lots of it, in many configurations) and into becoming this kind of ubersexpert (how’s that for a bullshitty word?). And its not that I am not that woman or that I faked it til I made it (though maybe a little), but sometimes I left my inner self out of the picture a bit. Though I think I’ve created a new baby space for that in my life nowadays, but its still sparkly new and… weird.
I’m writing a chapter about blogging. It’s kind of emotional, more so than many of the other chapters in my book. As I talk to, IM and email with different women I realize how much I miss writing my heart out, and writing dirty stories, but the exposure would feel weird these days. And not just because my mom is reading, or my boyfriend’s mom might start reading at any moment.
The act of writing about my relationships and about sex I was having transformed not just my thoughts about those things, but also the things themselves, in a subtle but still seismic shift. I initially wrote that sentence in the second person: you you, pointing fingers. But I went back and changed it, owned it. Blogging did these things for me - I did them to myself.
My dad said to me just after I came out to my parents about all of this (I’m gesturing grandly) that, “You’re kind of like the female Henry Miller - only stupid.” By this he meant - Henry Miller waited many years to publish about his erotic life. I’ve done it instantaneously, as things were happening, hours after getting sticky and sweaty. This is the urgency of new media, reconfigurations of privacy and self portraiture.
And nowadays I’m very happy to write one step removed - I’ve learned that privacy and secrecy aren’t the same thing, and I love my private little world, my army of two, my quiet space. But I also feel compelled to tell - everything. In a post today Melissa Gira repeats the mantra Thisisnotapersonalblog. Thisisnotapersonalblog.
It is. It is not.
It’s hard to figure out where the boundaries are sometimes, and why I put them there or move them inches this way or that.
Posted by Dacia at November 9, 2006 12:16 AM
Comments
Oh dearest, how I miss it too!
Posted by: Layla at November 16, 2006 01:28 PM
This hit home for me. I have had to close up in many ways in order to continue writing my own life: mine is only a personal blog, with a highly circumscribed subject matter, and even so the act of self-revelation itself requires that there are many things I do not write about. This intensified over the year and a half or so I have blogged: my writing has changed.
There are boundaries I set which are about secrecy: I leave out all identifying details about the person I write about. But most of the boundaries are about privacy: the most important things are never written about by any of us, I think—we need to maintain the privacy of just two.
There’s an urge to tell everything, and the boundaries we set are a kind of perpetual balancing act. One of my own accomodations now is that I have recently asked the person I am involved with not to read me. The things I need to write about are things that will cut him too deeply.
sometimes I think about starting a blog somewhere else entirely. It wouldn’t matter though. I’d feel safer giving some identifying details about him— the colour of his eyes, how we met, what he does—-but I would still feel under the same constraints w/r/t privacy.
good luck to you, O
Posted by: O at November 19, 2006 09:35 AM
