When the missus and I walk in the morning, this is the view we see from the top of the trail. It really does limit how much bitching I'm actually allowed to do.
1. My winter depression is making me prone to unfortunate negative comments.
2. Despite this, it's been the best year of my life, and it's hard for me to talk about it without feeling as if I'm trying to incite envy or admiration.
3. I do have some very real difficulties in my life, and it's hard for me to talk about them without feeling as if I'm begging for assistance or wallowing in self-pity.
4. A lot of this stuff is too personal for me to be willing to go into it in public, out of respect for the privacy of others. My personal life is intertwined with my creative work, but there are other people in my life, and it is impossible to write on some of these subjects without dragging their trash out into the yard. Oh, well.
5. My personal identity is currently in a state of flux. This is always true, but over the last few years most of my identifying characteristics have reversed polarity or vanished like boojums. The ugly duckling experience is fantastic fun, let me tell you, but nobody really prepares you for it.
6. And talk about things they don't prepare you for. Now that the dust is clearing and I'm starting to get a view of the story I'm telling myself about myself? It turns out I might be the kind of person who really doesn't get to talk about himself. That if I say, "Look at me, I am this," it will turn out that what I am is a grandiose asshole. Other people are already using the words, and I should keep my mouth shut about myself and just do my work.
7. A lot of what I'm facing involved mental illness and its relationship to violence, and right now there are things going on bim, bam, boom, that tie into my personal experiences in a way that would make any discussion seemed timed to associate my personal journey with any number of public and private tragedies. And if you will excuse me, fuck that noise.
8. My performance work has become my preferred outlet for my personal writing, and while I have taken at least one piece from a blog post, I kind of feel as if I'm working with a limited pool of material, and I know what I want to do with it at this point.
9. And that has me wondering what the purpose of the blog is in the long run. Right now it would be very good for me to post regularly, and I have a few thoughts as to where I should go with it. But right now, the 'personal blog' just doesn't seem to be working for me. This sounds dopey. But right now, I am finding out that a lot of my personality and the way I present myself is rooted in both defensiveness and a need for recognition. I don't think it's something awful, but it turns out that as I've become more secure, my motivations for interacting with the world are changing. If my needs are being met, I'm less interested in using the blog toward those ends, and more interested in finding ways of advancing my cultural ends and comrades. But how to do that?
10. It's become kind of obvious to me over the past few months that there is a real split in my presentation here, and my presentation in real life. Here on the blog? It is the real me, but you wouldn't get this tone from me unless you were a good friend and we were getting a buzz on.
Now that I'm getting to be known a little more, there are people reading the blog who have not met me, and it might not be a bad idea to present the side of me that people like rather than the side that makes me feel like a tough guy.
But that would mean either writing the blog as presentation rather than recreation, or changing the tone of my internal voice, he groused.
11. I keep starting posts similar to this one, and I never get around to finishing them, partially due to the old SAD, but mostly because I can't think of a clever ending for them.
Like that one.
