Scrubbed clean
14 November 2011 01:50 PM Categories: Quotidian existence | On writing
Sometimes I scrub the write clean, tart it up, obscure (hopefully) most of its resemblances to reality, and post it. Sometimes that’s impossible, or changes the meaning so much that what I was originally going for is covered over in an ill-fitting disguise. Changing a write is always a dangerous business: I risk losing the poetry of it, the truth of the matter, and I also risk hurting or alienating people I care about who may recognize their outline in what I write.
Then there’s me, the habitual self-revealer with the same tired old themes: the suppression of various emotions, the over-emoting, the whining. The depression. The isolation. How much do I want to reveal about myself here? How many times can I wrench my heart out of my chest and wave it around? To whom am I communicating?
I struggle with the desire to reveal all, the ugly bits, the wanting emotions, the feelings that I can’t seem to get out except through a keyboard. It’s the thrill of the emotional flash, the showing of vulnerability, the communication of my disease to others. But some things are personal (did I ever think I would write that?). And sometimes revelation is self-serving.
Because writing is seduction. And I want to seduce. I want your minds, your hearts, I want to show you pieces of me, to hold you in my hand while I occupy your mind. I want to form images that you will never forget, that you will always associate with me. I want you to think that you know me. I want you to never forget me.
What’s the harm in that? Maybe it’s the removed quality, the lack of risk. It’s the fantasy of seduction that I’m after, not the actual business of doing it. Once my words are out there, someone might pick up on them. No effort is needed from me. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and I go at it again the next day with the same emotions. Worst of all, it's a compulsion that fulfills an emotional need. I contain things so well (too well) and want a place to let them live, however briefly, in words, with an audience. Wouldn't it be better just to have them exist in the real world, to integrate them into me?
Leave the topic alone, Jennifer. Put the laptop down and slowly back away.
When I was twenty-five, a newly minted librarian living in Ohio, I struck up a flirtation with an artist/fellow state employee. He wanted to film me in black and white, riding an Italian scooter, smoking, always smoking, quiet, contained, something to show this undercurrent of suppressed desire he saw within me. We never followed through on his plan. I’ve lost touch with him. He had it right, though. Suppression.
I suppress and reveal. Suppress and reveal. And today I am trying to live with it while still keeping it under wraps, living with the things that perhaps are just part of who I am, destined to be hidden for the rest of my life.
As for the rest of you, the ones I've borrowed without thinking, you're safe, at least as far as blog posts go. I can't promise that the stuff of my life won't show up somewhere else someday. But I promise to blur the line between fiction and reality so well that only the larger truth remains.
One paragraph of this was from today's prompt, "Jumping."
At the moment, writing is begetting writing for me. Prompts, psych paper, posts. Feeling lucky to be able to fit it all in.
Image (Low flying dames) by me -- this was on the sidewalk near a Halloween witch display in our neighborhood. Maybe the connection of image to text is getting more and more obscure ...
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