Girrrrrrrrlbomb

Janice Erlbaum was just at the store, reading from Girlbomb (as an aside, how amazing is it that she can make her name into "Girlbomb"?) and talking about wading (nay, shining) through endless personal crisis and the crises of others and what it is to make a life of writing memoir. She was an incredibly calm and measured and funny presence, keeping perspective about self and world, and she said a lot of things that made me think extra hard about my own thick fall soup of preoccupations.

I never feel quite comfortable writing in this blog. Some of you know of (and fewer were privy to) the birth of Sarah-blogger, a Livejournal that I kept regularly from the August before I was a sophomore in high school all the way up to February 2009. It saw me through a lot, my LJ - a lot of passive aggression, a lot of sorrow, a lot of development, a lot of heartbreak, a lot of joy, a lot of annoyance, a lot of epiphany. Seven seminal years. There were only twelve people who could see it - some who I knew well before I ever found the Internet, some who started as real life acquaintances and through its auspices (comments and friend pages and the dips in and out of parallel young adult experience) became some of the people I now hold dearest to my heart and am the least inclined to hide anything from, some who started as Livejournal friends and became some of my bestest real life friends. Scoff at the internet all you want, but this was a real tool, outlet, community, source of connection - Whit and Salma and Lauren and Becks and Zoe and Savannah, Chrissy and Keight and MLE, Andrew and Darren and Ellen - these were, are, some of the people who I most trust and love, most unabashedly turn to in times of need, most trust, most relate to. This February, after the hardest few months of my life, I spent some afternoons carefully copy-pasting every entry, of which there were thousands, into emails - sending them to myself, archiving in a folder. And then I deleted it. It had seen me through too much, and I needed to not have my emotional history shoved in my face all the time. I would have the past catalogued for eternity in my inbox if I needed it. My relationships with those people all existed outside the Internet, and I knew that they would be there in the same way that they had been there, logging on and scrolling their friends pages, whether or not I cut the cord. I deleted it, and I felt, finally, like I was actually turning a new leaf, and I continued to live and heal, and to love and trust and cherish everything that Livejournal had brought me.

The virtue of that blog was that it was a virtual safe space. I had nothing to hide there, no one to protect, no reason to feel silly or judged about airing my dirty laundry or simply the depths and quirks of my consistently overwrought mind. I could write long rambles in half-coherent French and post stupid videos and spill myself unadulterated into that space 24/7, 365 days a year. It wasn't just blogging, it was revealing myself to myself in writing, in memoir, in nonfiction. And since I stopped that, I haven't had such an outlet. This is that, theoretically, but it's not the same. Tonight Janice said something about writing memoir that cut to the heart of how I feel about blogging in a public space (I am a babysteps kinda girl, and not trying to write a memoir just yet, or possibly ever) - she said "When you're writing a memoir, you're not just writing about yourself - you're writing about your world and about the other people in your world, and they didn't ask to be written about." So here it is, my creative self and my diplomat self, my self who believes that true justice is achieved through true expression and my self who desperately wants to make sure not to hurt anyone she loves. Bumping up against each other for all eternity, and not only preventing me from writing as much as I feel needs to be written, that I see and hear and feel that touches me, that I observe in the world around me, in this space, but preventing me from writing it at all. This is the same reflex that has me putting a life of activism on hold until I am more stable in myself, and more life-educated. It is the belief that the way we carry and express ourselves, in craft and in work and in daily life, requires constant responsibility and accountability. I run into it again and again with every sphere that I care passionately for and stand on the brink of throwing myself into. Some people say things like "If you're so worried about being responsible and accountable, you clearly have no problem being responsible and accountable," (my mom, among others), and "that's all well and good, but don't let it paralyze you," (Mattias, among others). But I think the best thing that's been said to me about this, and the thing that is hardest for me to take to heart, is something that the lovely Christine Rose, my most cherished of mentors, wrote to me last fall when I was fighting through a pit of confusion and despair. She said "You said you want to make good decisions, and that's great but it's also ok as you are figuring things out to make a bad decision. In a way a series of bad decisions helps you look back and figure out what you don't want to pursue and what is more of a fit for your life and personality."

I first became a disciplined writer through blogging. I wrote posts that my friends could see and posts that only I could see(well, and Ellen, who had my password and is the only person in the world who has seen all my demons in writing). I wrote usually at least daily and sometimes more than once a day. I came home from class and films and parties and stopped in the middle of books to scribble something and the things I thought about it so I wouldn't forget. I anguished over boys. I wrote poems and freewrites and gibberish. I logged on when I was ecstatic and when I was despairing, when the people I loved or the country and city and state I live in were ecstatic or despairing. I wrote all of it. I don't write now unless I am "trying to create," a bad, bad attitude all around, and one that leaves me with almost nothing to show creatively for the past few months. It took me a long time to realize that blogging didn't only hold personal value for me (the ability to process everything that I tend(ed) to bottle in daily life), but immense creative value. These are of course intertwined, inseparable even. It allowed me to make tableaux and vignettes of the life I was living, and to see the ebb and flow of character and plot arcs outside of fiction. It allowed me to belabor and obsess over the fiction/nonfiction divide.

The truth is, I'm scared to do that here. But a big part of my life, the writing part, a part that I not only want and aspire to, but desperately need on a daily basis, is missing. So I will try? Regardless, I need to find a solution.

Guess we'll see what happens.

(Coming Soon: Why Certain People Can Be Humanitarians and I Am Not One of Them Yet, Annotated Quotes From Fabulous Books I Am Reading, Blogging as/versus Creative Nonfiction, etc.)