I have been in a crazy beam lately. I started this blog but have been without internet for some time. So I will probably rapid fire post several entries once I get my technical issues resolved. Oh hell. Half those issues are dealing with time and my lack of it. Still, I have things to do here. I must get started even if the time space continuum isn’t cooperating with me right now.
October 6, 2019
I have hesitated to write this first “real” entry because, although writing is therapeutic and personally creative to me, and I have journaled consistently since I was in 3rd grade, my diaries and journals have always been private. I have fiercely guarded the privacy of my written thoughts because, in many ways , I felt like I gave quite a bit of myself away to others and I wanted to maintain a kernel of myself that was only mine. I wanted a place where I could always be real, without any exterior reference or judgement. To have a safe space to explore my dark and sometimes insane monsters. And honestly, I have been continually called to look at my own shit, get it out, eject it from its recesses. So I write. I doodle and sketch. I fill empty pages with all the thoughts that stir me. Then I let the words ferment. I go back and uncork my works, rereading my life stories from time to time. I learn new lessons from old lessons. Because I have been able to grasp patterns in my behavior, I sometimes consciously experiment with my actions/reactions when I am facing things today that remind me of situations I have faced in the past. I evolve and expand in this recursive way. It is a yoga I am very comfortable with, even though I sense its limitations on some level.
A public journal, which is what I see this as, or I intend to use it as, is a radical departure from all my markings of the past. I have a deep need to interrogate to understand things, especially to understand myself and why the hell I do the things I do. So I think, maybe, that I will be coming to this new, very public place, to tell myself a story whose moral makes transparent the warrants, intentions and lust that lurk underneath everything in my world. Which is to say I couldn’t begin this blog in earnest without addressing the process.
I came out of college with a degree in writing/rhetoric as well as philosophy. I’m supposed to know grammar, but I really don’t. One of the first rules of rhetoric club is that one writes to engage an audience. One teaches them something, or amuses them, or confounds them as the case may be. But whatever, the audience is the reason for communicating. Communication requires duality at minimum. I suppose I could say that in my past journaling, I was othering myself, writing to a goat who hadn’t yet come on the scene, a future me. But with this effort, I’m still unsure how to take an audience into account. Is this writing for me? For you? It’s a conundrum. It makes this effort something like a reality TV show where, once a camera is trained on a situation and the participants are conscious of it, they can no longer be said to be acting un-self-consciously or naturally any longer. So we never see their authentic responses or expressions and thus, it’s not real, even as it may entertain. And it makes me wonder if anything I write here could be real or say something authentic about me, my experiences and my karma in the world. And if it doesn’t reflect something true in me, then what use is it to me as a journal entry?
I know I could just decide to write only culled, selective reflections from an otherwise personal diary. Rewriting them for the public’s eye, and with the normative goals generally attached to writing. But I don’t want to “BE” a writer of a new age, self-help blog. I mean, my goal here is to help myself and set a record of my own passionate journey and the attendant reflections along the way. I want to do MY shadow work here, not yours. I could also just change the aims of my writing and not use it as a tool for personal growth and reflection. I could use it just to rediscover my writing chops, for example. Oh I know. I’m over thinking things perhaps.
I don’t know if there will be anything here worth a damn to anyone except me, and I don’t apologize for that. For me it is a challenge to put myself out in the world, unfiltered. Because like so many people, I have spent a good part of my life behind various masks, and I’ve delineated this imaginal and reflective space like a kind of secret world, and was highly possessive of it, of the privacy of that one part of my soul. Now I think, through this experiment, I am being called to let that secrecy go. I think I have always been scared to death, on a certain level, to reveal the mysteries and madness lurking underneath my solid, stoic exterior. I can be exceptionally candid with people, but very few people know me. Like the criminal who subconsciously wants to get caught, however, I have this voluminous paper trail detailing all my crimes. I once asked the question of a fortune teller, “will I ever be clean?” I think that is one part of what I am attempting here. The other part is simply me challenging my own fear around a public interiority. I LIKE TO DO THINGS THAT SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF ME. That is definitely a pattern in my behavior, reckless and stupid as it has sometimes gone for me. Nevertheless, in this case I can at least imagine the benefits in terms of personal growth from facing this fear and going through the process. Maybe I am sweeping out into the light the last shred of my ego that I here must deconstruct, turn inside out, putting all this madness and these memories on this weird blog whose formatting I still haven’t learned. It remains to be seen if I can even do this.
The Body is Always Dreaming 