Blog: Geek Clique or Soapbox Confessional?

I've followed a thought-provoking zigzag path through the blogosphere tonight. Julie Leung started it all:

-- She writes about how blogging is like high school, with intense concern -- fueled by easily checkable hot-or-not measures like SiteMeter and the TTLB Ecosystem -- about who's in, who's out, and who's popular. She discovers that some of the most dogged and venerable bloggers, like Rebecca Blood and Dave Winer, who you might think of as ur-Insiders, admit to feeling like outsiders. And it dawns on Julie that "Inside, we are all outsiders."

A hugely liberating realization that did not hit home for me until my late 30s. I think in part there's something simple and perceptual about it. We can see other people. They have a bright, bounded solidity we don't have to ourselves. (Sylvia Plath in a poem to her baby son: "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious.") We perceive ourselves as dark and treacherous oceans rife with downdrafts, riptides, boiling volcanoes and blank spots. We know how far an empathetic remark, good thought or witty joke has to travel, out of what mists and across what abysses, to reach our lips (or fingertips) at the right moment. And so we're startled to discover that other people think we have it all together.

-- Julie then writes about bloggers who quit to spend more time with their families, or to protect (sometimes a bit late, a bit guiltily) their families' privacy. She links to Ayelet Waldman's Salon column, in which we learn that Ayelet gave up her blog, Bad Mother, because, among other things, when she mentioned having suicidal thoughts on it she felt she'd gone too far. (She says she has bipolar disorder, and her meds were out of whack.)

This makes me think about how I feel guilty and embarrassed in one way when I blog about personal stuff, and in another way when I don't. I started out as an impersonal, outward-looking blogger, but was dared and inspired by my brother True Ancestor and his blogfriends and admirers (Tamar, Danny, Richard) to risk being more self-revealing -- only to embarrass the hell out of the other brother ("part of me thinks that people who reveal so much of themselves to the public should BE committed"). It's a no-win situation, or maybe I just haven't quite struck the balance that feels right to me yet. I tend to lurch from one extreme to the other. One way, I feel faintly exhibitionistic (and like I am exhibiting others, such as my husband, without their consent). The other way I feel masked and faintly phony. Right now, for instance, I'm blogging intensely on matters most distant from me (like a bird faking a broken wing to decoy attention from the nest) because it's an acutely awful moment in my personal life -- I'm clearing out an apartment full of dusty archaeological layers of old and terrible mistakes. There's no way I can write about it, nor should I, yet the bright impersonal commentating in which I take refuge kind of makes me sick.

It's one reason it's so comforting to read the journals of great (dead) writers and discover, behind their awesome genius and disciplined craft, their procrastination, vanity, agonies of depression, obsession, indulgence, money troubles, love troubles. Which brings us right back to topic 1, and the conclusion to Julie's post about blogging and high school:

The truth is we are all outsiders. Our secret fears are real and revealed. We are each random points, outliers, misfits, rejects and strangers. We are alone. We are all different. Yet we are all the same.

(And she was writing at 2:45 A.M. And it's 2:17 A.M. now.)

- amba

UPDATE: Another blog malady: besides not knowing quite what voice to write in or how much to reveal, there's what Sara at Raising Up Sunshine describes: the blog as vampire or Frankenstein monster, your own creation, your homemade best friend turning on you, taunting you. Why on earth did I ever name it that?? Now I'm stuck with it. And now I have to feed the damn thing! And I haven't got a thing in the house! Sara is rebelling: "fuck you, blog." Long silences while they're not speaking to each other.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Here's a little more evidence in favor of your point: you say that I was among the bloggers who inspired you to write more intimately about yourself, but I feel that you were one of the bloggers who inspired me to do so! After all, you've been blogging longer than me, and you've said much more about your marriage and spouse than I have about mine (my present/future one, that is).

There's an expression, "If we could see ourselves as others see us," but maybe the opposite is also true: "If we could see others as we see ourselves." Not neatly packaged individuals who have it all together, but chaotic oceans in turmoil. (William James has a great essay on this -- I forget the title but it's one of his most famous ones, maybe "A Pluralistic Universe." He talks about the need to sense the inner life of the world around us.)

[Yehoshua Karsh]

The paragraph beginning:"A hugely liberating realization ..." was delicious!

[Matt]

Makes me think of the lines from T.S. Eliot:

"there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet..."

Looking out at others, we see their faces, but we don't see, as you say, all that has gone on (and goes on) inside. We see the face-- the outer surface-- but we don't see all that has gone into preparing the face that meets us. We think it's always been that set, that frozen, that perfectly unchanging. And then we wonder why we don't feel that way ourselves.

[Tamar]

How wonderful to be back and read this posting. I have been thinking about this a lot while I was away and this gives me even more food for thought. It inspires me to write about it... hold on!