A Break For Boring Blog Stuff
If you made a comment during the Google Buzz debacle and it hasn’t shown up yet, I probably deleted it. I had five million fucking comments and 90% of them were trolls, so I wasn’t willing to dig through and find the real stuff and then take the time to respond. Sorry!
Back to Navel-Gazing
As each wave of new readers came to this blog, I had to sit and seriously consider what I was doing and why. I started this blog because I was fed up with living a life where I could not speak out loud. I wanted to carve out a space in the world where I could speak out loud, freely. I know – in the same way some people know about God – that the vast majority of human experience is similar if not identical, and that there is almost no feeling I can describe that another person will not have felt as well. And so I feel like it’s almost a necessity, as a human being, to sometimes take the risk of describing your feelings out loud, because it can bring such relief to you and others when you realize you’re not alone. This is part of why I named the blog Fugitivus, and identify so strongly with the idea of running away. Silence is a master; it doesn’t serve anybody. Speaking out is a way to run away, to escape. The concepts of running away and escaping get a generally bad rap, implying cowardice, but I view these things as an extension of the axiom, “You can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Running away from the master’s tools is finding a new way to dismantle the house; it can’t be built or maintained without your labor and the labor of others like you. So yeah, you heard it here: fucking off is a completely viable revolutionary tactic, though like all tactics, isn’t enough in isolation to tumble the master’s house.
When the blog got more popular, my quiet corner of the internet got louder and became more work. I didn’t want that, but as it came gradually, I felt like I could handle it. And I felt like I was accomplishing a higher purpose. With each person that sent an email or a comment describing how they discovered they weren’t alone, I felt like I was doing some good. Watching my work go viral, get spread to places I never would have suspected, gave me a lot of satisfaction. Not having my name on any of it didn’t bother me. I actually liked that quite a bit. I wanted my work to be free, free, free; the message was more important to me than the notoriety, and I felt like whatever people were getting out of it was way bigger than me. I have gotten lots of comments from people about how I’ve changed their lives. I don’t tell them this, because everybody’s feelings are valid and I’m not going to nitpick their revelations, but I don’t think I have anything to do with it. If the strength to change wasn’t in them, I wouldn’t have had any kind of affect. So I liked the idea of making my work even less about me. Not only did I not change you, but as far as you’re concerned, I don’t even exist in the real world. I’m just words on paper, a ghost with a typewriter. You’re the one who made a door open somewhere.
Then I made what was perhaps a bad decision. I got this new job, and started writing about parental notification laws. I considered it for a long time before I decided to write about my work. I knew that writing about my job would seal this blog as anonymous forever. I could never come out with my real name, because it could be attached to my blog, and could have unknown ramifications for the parental notification work we do. There’s every chance nobody would care – if you read the laws of my state, it’s pretty clear who Department X is, so it’s only a secret insofar as nobody wants to discuss it – but there’s every chance that it would be just the chink in our armor that anti-choice groups would need to apply pressure. I don’t want to jeopardize that. Though if I didn’t want to jeopardize that, I probably shouldn’t have written about it at all. This was a big conflict for me. I obviously place a lot of faith in making secret things unsecret; I firmly believe shameful things are secret primarily because secrecy creates shame; I don’t think they’re shameful to start off with, until they get shushed. I know the abortion debate suffers from the lack of voices on the pro-choice side, unwilling to identify themselves with the work and the decisions. Department X isn’t ashamed of doing their legal jobs, but they know that the rest of the world is, or is too afraid to speak up. So, parental notification laws get passed, they sound vaguely like a good idea, and nobody gets to hear the reality of their votes because workers and patients are afraid to identify themselves with legal procedures. I knew writing about Department X might be a really big mistake, but I felt letting the opportunity to put some reality out there into the reality-deficient void was a bigger mistake. I decided to accept the fact that this meant that I could never again toy with the idea of “coming out” as a blogger.
Then! Google Buzz.
Fucking christ.
Here is the arrogant thing that I am just going to have to say even though it makes me cringe: I CANNOT SEEM TO STOP THIS BLOG FROM BECOMING POPULAR. Despite never making an attempt to gain or keep readers, despite never trying to name-drop or publicize (because I wanted a quiet little livejournal), I keep getting popular. And being popular brings a whole new slew of concerns into my life. The comments and the emails take up more and more of my time. It’s a lot more work and anxiety to make my blog posts, knowing how many people are reading them. I spend more time afraid that somebody will track down my real identity. I go to work and people ask me, “How was your weekend?” and I cannot say, “Fucking insane! I was in the New York Times!” Instead I say, “You know, watched a movie, stayed at home,” and they make jokes about how boring I am. Ha ha! Yes, quite so. I work on what I consider my “real” writing – my fiction and autobiographical work – and get tired thinking about writing proposals and inquiries to agents and publishers where I have no credentials, because I cannot tell them about my blog.
I shut my blog down because I didn’t want to deal with all the attention. That’s not why I started this blog, and that’s not what I want. I spent an hour trying to catch up on comments, got through the 400 that had been in queue, only to find out that another 400 had built up in the meantime, most of them from the same trolls who were now accusing me of censoring their FREE SPEECHES. With the high proportion of trolls, and the insane amount of hits, I thought there was a pretty good chance that somebody would make an attempt at sabotage by trying to figure out my real identity. I didn’t want to worry about it, so I just shut down until the heat died out. I figured anybody who liked my blog would stick around and wait, and everybody else would be siphoned off whenever the next article about RAPE VICTIMS LIE or RACISM EXISTS came out.
As soon as I turned off my blog, I got to thinking. This shit wasn’t what I signed up for, and I had to admit, I’m dissatisfied with it. The divide between my anonymous persona and me was creating too many obstacles to the things I wanted to do. Without the parental notification articles, I’d probably be willing at this point to “come out,” but what’s done is done and that option is closed now. So, I’m left with a task I have appointed myself to perform for free. It has become draining and time-consuming, and it is constantly terrifying me with new surprises in popularity. It doesn’t meet my expectations of what I started it for, and it siphons time from my “real” writing. It’s given me a lot of new inspiration and growth and experience and ideas, but some of those ideas are contingent on the fact that I am POPULAR BLOG AUTHOR, and can’t be accomplished by real-life Harriet, who does boring things on her weekend.
So I decided that when I came back, I was going to announce that my blog was over. I’d leave it up for a few months, so people could copy whatever they liked about it, but then it’d be gone. No more worries about people discovering my identity, no more time sucked into a profitless hole. I can start from scratch with my real name somewhere else, with this new boost of confidence that people actually like my work.
That was the plan. Then, the other day, I watched the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. There was plenty about the movie that I thought was silly or ham-fisted or just kind of ridiculous, but that’s not the point. The point is, it got me thinking about “real” work. I too often cripple myself with this false division of what “counts” and what doesn’t, what’s real, what’s mature, and what’s just me fucking off. Thing is, this blog was me fucking off, and I now realize that I have been blessed to stumble upon a talent I didn’t know I had, and a way to access it that I never would have realized. I never in a million years would have thought that not taking shit super seriously would lead to goodness and wonder.
Watching IBTC, I was reminded of something I learned a long time ago but keep forgetting: if you want shit done, you just do it. If you want to start a revolution, you pull together some friends and you start a revolution. If you want to be a “real” writer, you write. If you want to help people, you jump in and start talking. If you want to do things properly, knock yourself out. But if you want to just do things, you get your hands dirty and accept mistakes. There is probably a word for this, or a particular brand of feminism, but I’ll just describe it how I understand it: I like people who create and move and change for the thrill and joy and sake of it. And I especially admire women who do this on their own terms, who just do it without dithering about how, who, what, where when, funding, backing, support, organization.
So I started thinking about expectations. In general, I believe that if the world doesn’t match your expectations, you only have two choices: change your expectations, or accept your dissatisfaction. You can’t change or control the world, only yourself, so you either change your expectations to suit the world better, or you resign yourself to being disappointed and stop taking it personally. So, for my blog, I expected a quiet little corner. I had that, for a while, but then I lost it, and I keep re-losing it harder and harder. I’d be willing to accept that, change my expectations of what this blog is, if I didn’t have other expectations. I expect to be a writer. And my concept of writer comes with this whole proper path of query-agent-rejection-rejection-rejection-success-book cover with my name on it-sense of personal satisfaction. I keep putting that life off. I don’t submit my work. It’s not rejection that bothers me. It’s the sheer amount of work that doesn’t involve writing. I want to be a writer because I like to write, not because I like to deal with query letters and agents and making connections and selling myself and all that bullshit. I want my work out there and able to be read by others. That’s my entire endgame. I don’t need money or fame or notoriety. I just want a book that can be acquired and read.
My blog, with its irrepressible fucking notoriety, is like this big nyah-nyah in the face of my writing expectations. Bypassing all the bullshit I hate about writing, my blog has become everything I wanted – except I can’t put my fucking name on it, and it’s not “real” writing. My blog is a bunch of ranting essays that I crack off when I should be finishing my stories or novels. It could be the perfect vehicle to publicize my other writing, except I can’t put my name on any of it. So, I’ve got two things that no longer meet my expectations and actively inhibit each other. Can I change my expectations?
I’ve decided I can. I’ve had a few long-term ideas that I’ve been wanting to put into formation things that are more suited to this blog than my “real” writing. When I’m inhibited by this proper idea of what’s real, those projects can never work. But when I open myself up to the idea of harnessing what I’ve got here without concern for the right way of doing things, this shit has got a chance. I know I’m being vague. That’s because explaining what I’m thinking of doing next would be another blog post and a half, and I want to spend a little more time thinking about how to enact all this.
So, in the meantime, here’s how it stands: Fugitivus is open for business again. I’m going to be making some big changes, though I don’t know how quickly the changes will happen, because I work 9-5 and also I am drunk right now. Hi!
