From there to here
I started out writing anonymously, with the idea that I would probably write while locked up in the bathroom. It was the only room in which I could shut the door and have some semblance of privacy (most of the time), although that concept didn't last very long, thank goodness, and I am happy that I didn't name the blog the first thing that came to mind, The Bathroom Diaries.
In preparation for a February blogiversary post, I’ve been going through the old stuff, including a file of posts I deleted early on because of their extremely personal, current-at-the-time nature. In the very early days, I wrote candidly about my life. I could do this because nobody was reading and nobody knew who I was anyway. It’s interesting – and sometimes disconcerting – to see the roots of some of my current themes in my early writing, though I have also come a very long way.
For example, here’s something from December 27, 2007: Most of today was spent trying to fight the feeling of being in a mind-numbing life. It's a great psych-out, talking my brain out of its funk, trying to stay in the moment. Lots of internal pep talks. I am no longer totally mired in brain funk, but still struggle with boredom and my self-imposed exile. Four-plus years is way too long to feel that way, but at least things are changing.
Here’s what I wrote on January 16, 2008 on the idea behind writing to survive: Trust me, this is writing to survive. If I don't get it out of my mind via my fingers, I think I would do something really destructive. There is an element of self-censorship to what I write, but that's good. It gives it form and reason.
I’m not sure what I think about this now, as someone who has both been very open on the blog (perhaps too open, especially when it comes to writing about other people) and has also constructed metaphorical frameworks in order to control my emotions and threatening thoughts, posts that attempt to extinguish or at the very least contain my internal fires. Self-censorship is not the right word to describe how I form my version of reality here. Clearly I get something by being open about my feelings, open in this very public context as much as I able to be open, but maybe the rationale for that is an inability to be open elsewhere. And sometimes I obscure my intent with metaphor and walls of words, all written with a compulsion to get them out there, as if I was sending secret messages to an ideal reader.
That post goes on to say: As I was playing with H and C today (H=husband, C=the boy aka child), I reminded myself of how short these days are. C won't be little forever. He won't always want to be with me. He won't remember wanting to rub and kiss my belly. His sweet (albeit repetitive) play will change and he will move on and be an independent creature. He deserves a sense of his inherent worth, not a vague feeling of being inconvenient (oh, I hope I'm not passing that feeling on to him).
There is no danger of the boy forgetting the soothing properties of my belly – he still rubs and kisses it when he needs to be comforted. His play has gotten less repetitive, of course, and I still try to be in the moment with him as much as possible, to remind myself that his childhood is fleeting. And now that I have more personal space – it didn’t exist back then, between the staying at home and the kid who didn’t want to go anywhere and the extended breastfeeding and co-sleeping – I no longer worry about giving him the idea that he is inconvenient.
Over time, larger themes have emerged – guilt, forgiveness, desire, – my voice has become stronger, and my writing has shifted. Certain topics take on the quality of a wave, with the buildup, the crest and trough, sometimes building up again months later (for example, the stillbirth of my first son was a huge topic in late 2008 – early 2009, with intermittent, much less overwrought mentions after that, not that I've dropped it completely). I’m also having fun identifying my favorite posts which, surprisingly, are mainly fictional. For example, Berkeley type still makes me laugh and The Bottom of the Sea, part of the NaNoWriMo novel I wrote in 2009, shows what I can do when I really apply myself. In the process of identifying, of charting the progress of my mind and where I've gotten stuck, as well as seeing how I took something I wanted to do – write – and made it happen, I am better able to evaluate what works and what I must change before another four years slip into memory.
One thing that I can both agree and disagree with now, this sign-off from January 9, 2008: Too self-aware. Damn. And without any prospects. The prospects are out there, but I might need to tone down the self-awareness a bit. Too much can paralyze.
Image: The boy, spring 2008.
Finishing this up as the boy lies sick in the couch across the room, wondering if this post will be of interest to anyone but me. Well, at least I can show that change is possible, and that even without much external change there can be internal shifts. I credit writing and my determination to keep on doing it.
The nightly freakout
But now I remember the dreams. Me in a Whole Foods produce section desultorily piloting my cart. The space was all matte linoleum floors and rustic wood boxes stacked with unblemished fruit and vegetables. I was dressed down, way down, with holes in my clothes and shapeless pants. I hadn't showered. My hair was lank. And then I bumped into my exhusband. He looked sleek, well-dressed and happy. We had a pleasant conversation about his life and family. I slunk off feeling happy for him but unsettled about my place in the world.
There was a stint in an office building (a recurring dream setting), me waiting in this black modernist lobby for an elevator with all these men, some of them rumpled types that worked at my last employer, a think tank, some besuited or be-khakied and be-oxforded. Pressed and neat. But that dream didn't go beyond the lobby, or at least my memories of it have faded. Usually the dream building contains my old office. I show up, but don't have a job anymore. Or the elevator is unreliable. Or the elevator is huge, buzzing with people like a mobile cocktail party. Or the top floors are connected via a set of steep precarious escalators.
The final dream: I was alone on a beach, a dirty little stretch of coarse sand with a shack behind and a rusty container ship off in the distance. I was too close to the edge. The waves lapped at my feet, got my things wet, and then they pulled my phone into the surf only to spit it back out at me with the next set. The phone was waterlogged, maybe ruined. It squelched with wet when I shook it. How would I call home now? Why didn't we spring for the phone replacement package, just in case? Then I remembered: my assignment was to drive back from this beach, drive by myself back home, a long journey. I imagined fast highways, me rippling along, panicked behind the wheel. I couldn't do it. I barely knew how to turn the wheel. And now I couldn't call my husband for help because my phone was ruined, because I had been careless with it, unprepared, and what about the highways and then I woke up.
The dreams make sense to me, they are a part of the puzzle of my current life. I must prepare. Design the new blog, think about a job, learn how to dive how to drive again. I must take care of the present and prepare for the future, feeling the fear while not letting it take over, while my subconscious does its nightly freak out.
Image: Steps to the slide at a local park, taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. Like it for its washed-out dreamlike quality and the feeling of movement (or of choice of direction).
Shifting ephemera
My freaky dreams: Like the one where I'm walking on a rocky creek shoreline in bare feet and come across a series of very bloody, very fresh footprints. I step carefully, my eyes scanning the rocks for broken glass. I'm paralyzed with fear, of what might happen to me, of what has happened to the other person.
Or the one where my husband, son, and I are in a small rowboat on this oceanic street in Emeryville, caught between a fear of sharks and a fear of place. The bridge behind us is from another one of my dreams, where I'm in a small souvenir shop in Chesapeake City. In the back of the shop is a door that leads to a spindly ladder that takes you to that bridge. Maybe that bridge can lead us home, or at least back to Chesapeake City, down the ladder, into the shop, into a past life.
Or the one where I'm riding on a train with my high school class (all of us middle-aged now), talking to a man I haven’t spoken with since 7th grade, about the recklessness of Reagan, his foolish use of weaponry. I’m topless, I move my knees closer to the man's. I wake up.
Author Richard Price: I love author Richard Price. Not just because of his well-drawn characters or his true-to-life dialog, but for the way he talks about research and writing. I also like the fact that, for a while at least, he was so unsure of his own words that he read them over the phone to his editor: I used to be a lot worse. My editor before this, John Sterling, I read all of Clockers and Freedomland over the phone. Everyday he would have to listen for forty minutes. It’s not like he had anything else to do, just run a publishing company. This guy is on the phone, listening to this oral reading. (2003 interview with Richard Price on Identity Theory) But reading Clockers -- a book about the crack cocaine trade in a fictional New Jersey town, on which The Wire was partially based -- before bedtime is a bad idea, no matter how compellingly written it is.
I've been gathering interviews, reading and listening, taking it all in, but haven't been able to distill it into a post. If you haven't read him, do. I'd start with Samaritan or maybe Freedomland. He's painful to read, but so real.
Blogging the things that scare me: This will be the basis of my next blog, facing down the fears and writing about them. They run the gamut from driving a car to taking a yoga class to interviewing someone to writing crap to being needy. I'm trying to think of a clever blog title, too. Stay tuned -- the blog will probably go live next month.
Furniture rearrangement: I've been changing my back room lair into a family space -- moving the TV and stereo in. Soon we'll take apart the bed back there and put in a sleeper couch, the one that's currently in the living room, and we'll have a slightly more grownup couch out front. My writing desk (pictured above) is now in the living room, in the light, in a more open space.
Why I should go to PTA meetings: For the writing material they could provide, the adult drama that underpins school life, the hidden relationships, the broken psyches, the flow of emotion underneath the dry surface.
And now off I go, to do something that scares me: contact total strangers to talk about stuff I barely know about.
Image: My desk in its new spot.
Edited to give the fiction its own post, later today or tomorrow.
It's the life that I choose
Oh, I have friends (most of whom don't read this blog), but they are scattered. Even my local friends, women that I meet for dinner or drinks intermittently, I barely see. I don't talk on the phone except to my parents, my husband, and one good faraway friend. I don't often make plans to have coffee or tea with anyone. Once a month, there's the writing group. I interact with other parents, usually on a surface level. But otherwise? It's email or Facebook, the Round Robin. It's the blogging world. The occasional play date. That and conversation with my husband, though that is affected by illness (his, mine, the kid's) and by my sometimes abnormally early bedtime.
Middle-of-the-night thoughts are uniformly dark. I didn't wake up thinking about my glorious online life. I woke up thinking about my isolated existence, about how my husband needs more of an outside life, about how I must do something now about my fucked-up self. I thought about how I would jettison the modem, to end my dependence on online forums. I thought about how that would effectively end much of my communication with anyone. There was a brief moment of positivity when I remembered that I was once a lurker. No more. I am now a faceless participant!
I give my fucked-up self a lot of pep talks. ("There's no need to be so fucked up! You have a good life. You are a social animal, really!"). I berate her ("Why are you so goddamned obsessive? Stop it already!"). I sometimes soothe her with acceptance ("Oh, it's ok. What is normal anyway? Would you really want to be normal?"). These internal monologs are worse in the winter, the time of gray skies and sickness. I am even less social in winter -- come April, everything opens up and I'm a gadabout, or what amounts to a gadabout for a generally solitary person.
These were don't-go-back-to-sleep thoughts. I moved to the downstairs bedroom, thought more about my life, about how I would feel in the morning. It's a good life, but one in which I could reach out more, have more nights out with friends, more phone conversations. I picked up the book I'm rereading, Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and immersed myself in her strange existentialist life, barely fictionalized, the one she chose to live, deliberate, measured, ordered, perpetually deferential to Sartre.
Who's to say what's normal?
Image: This is how I look to my computer most of the time: unshowered, my teeth (hidden here) unbrushed, my hair uncombed, though I admit I choose a flattering light and angle, to spare you my baggy eyes. (And Anne -- I am wearing pajamas, or mainly pajamas, since I have to put on some normal clothes to walk the dog.) After I finish this post, it's off to get cleaned up before picking the boy up from school.
Origin story
The summer of 2007, right before I started the blog, was a terrible time. I missed DC, the ability to get around easily, my friends, the city, the houses, my old neighborhood with its grocery stores and restaurants and easy access to Rock Creek Park. I missed my mother, even though she was somewhat unavailable at the time. My husband was adjusting to a very different work environment, was struggling with identity questions of his own. I had all this bottled up sadness and anger, a story I had held onto for over twenty years. I had a lot to say, but no way to express it.
That's when I started writing, during my son's naps, writing in a notebook out on the deck, writing in the bathroom after I brushed my teeth, writing out what I used to think of as my defining story (maybe it still is, though I don't want to be defined by it). Then came a marital crisis followed by the creation of the blog, the pursuit of readership and other blogs to read, people to connect with. I started writing more, almost every day, and slowly my life changed (as it must: two-year-olds don't last forever, thank god). Through the Writing Salon, I found a writers' group. My son ended up at a wonderful play-based preschool, then started elementary school. The defining story changed, lost some of its significance. Other kinds of stories surfaced, mostly from my childhood and early adulthood, the days of river swimming and fights over dinner tables, of alcohol and tears.
It helps to look back, to see how far I have come, as a writer, as a person, how despite my internal struggles, I am capable of change. We're all capable of change, but sometimes it comes slowly, when we don't even know the wheels are turning.
Thank you for reading, for being witnesses.
Related posts: The end of anonymity, In the beginning . . .
Top image: The boy at almost-three, so cute, so all-encompassing.
Image: Me, sophomore year of high school, at the beginning of the troubles.
Edited on 1/7/11.
Where I am right now
I can hear a seagull screeching and the patter of rain against the deck, against the grass, against the faded IKEA play tent on its side in the backyard.
Sometimes I want to escape, but I don't know where I would escape to.
I've been wondering if the mailman is angry with me. This is code for something else. Maybe I'll write about it someday.
I've been thinking about turning off the comments in this blog. I'm thinking about starting a new blog. I'm thinking that if I keep on blogging, I'll never write anything of substance.
If I no longer belong to the East Coast and I haven't pledged my allegiance to the West Coast, where do I belong?
My fear of being invisible is coming to fruition.
No one can save me but myself and if I believe otherwise, I am delusional.
Lately I've been thinking that poetry, with its economy of words and strong imagery, would suit me.
And I keep on catching typos in this post, which means I have to make the changes, export the entire blog, and upload it all over again.
Tomorrow will be better, right?
Image: Neighbor cat on the fence.
Twenty-four hour party person
With the change, I also implemented a new commenting system, Disqus, in the hopes that some of the issues readers were having with the other system would go away. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the comments I imported into the system were not linking to my posts. I was also not thrilled with the location of the completed comments, which appeared down at the bottom of the page. So I've switched back to JS-Kit Echo, except that as of Monday night all of my old comments were floating around in cyberspace, unattached to the posts that prompted them. I apologize if one of your comments is out there, either from the brief reign of Disqus or the somewhat spotty ongoing commentship of JS-Kit Echo.
Everything else has changed, too though the language has stayed the same for the most part. Take a look around and leave a comment or email me to let me know if something works or doesn't work for you. You might also learn something new about me, discover another reason why I'm here.
So here you go. I hope you like it. I'm sure I'll be tweaking things over the coming weeks.
Image: Big Skully as angel, December 2009.
Edited 22 March to reflect change in commenting interface and to add all sorts of other stuff, too.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.
Honestly?
So. Gulp. Here I go.
My parents, all gussied up for the 1968 Senior Prom. Oh, if I could only still hold you two responsible for my neurotic ways! Instead, I will use you as photographic filler.
1. I find this task terrifying. Why? On one hand, I am pretty boring. On the other, I have all these worries that I am used to keeping mainly to myself. I am neurotic, for lack of a better term. So I find myself thinking of writing things here like "I am pathetic and antisocial." or "If you met me in the flesh, you'd be questioning whether I was really the person who writes this stuff." OK. Let's just say I'm insecure.
2. To continue in the same vein, now that it is possible that a lot of people from my past, childhood friends, old high school buddies, people who knew me in college, read this blog, I wonder what they think about these stories of mine. Did any of them know this stuff already? Do they look back at me with kindness or do they judge me? I'll never know, so I think I'll go for the kindness angle.
3. I will listen to a song over and over again when I have it stuck in my mind. Recent selections include Finish What You Started, All Come True, Funk #49, and Hot Sauce. Oh, and Ball and Biscuit.
4. While I am a good cook, some might even say a great cook, the only things that my son will eat in my presence are noodles with butter and cheese, packaged macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza crusts, and rice and beans from Chipotle (yes, he even refuses my rice and beans). Pasta with cream sauce? No. Soothing, buttery polenta? I don't think so. Anything with a green fleck or two in it? You must be joking. This would drive anyone crazy, but I had an epiphany the other night about why it was driving me murderously crazy. I have "meal issues," probably from a childhood of bad dinner table experiences, from being made to stand at the table as a three-year-old on a regular basis, to being totally ignored or berated by my former stepfather at mealtime, to finally being rejected as a dinner partner by my mother and Kevin when I was fourteen. My son's unhappiness with my food offerings felt, well, deeply personal. Once I realized this, my irritation level at his dietary preferences went down several notches. Though I still find them maddening.
5. You know that I don't drive, right? But did you also know that I don't bike, skateboard, scoot or Segway? It's a wheel thing, I suppose.
6. I really should be working on my novel. On my good (or is that "crazy"?) days, I have these grandiose notions of the brilliance of my writing. On my bad (or is that "realistic"?) days, I think my writing will never amount to anything. So blogging keeps me going while also distracting me from the larger purpose.
7. I hold on to people in my mind, keep crushes for decades, never really forget a friend, even if I haven’t spoken to them directly since middle school or even earlier. These attachments keep me plugged into the world, gossamer threads from my mind to yours. All it takes is a little tug -- a photo, an email, a similar name -- for me to conjure up the smells, the meal, the pains and joys, that awkward conversation we had fifteen years ago.
8. It could be that three cats, one dog, one child, one husband, a two-story house, and a backyard is too much. So I don't vacuum nearly as often as I should, the toilet needs scrubbing, and I finally stopped watering the impatiens after six months of careful attention.
9. My only regret is that I should have kissed him when I had the chance. Just to get it out of my head. This was years ago, when I was so focused on doing the right thing, on keeping a tenuous hold on my first marriage. But that kiss will never happen and as time goes by, the moment and its importance feel more and more distant. Still, I think about it sometimes and try to console myself with the fact that it would have been destined to end badly and my desire would have gone the way of most, shot through with sadness and regret.
10. I talk to my mother on the phone almost every day. Sometimes more than once a day. I worry about whether this is healthy, not because of our conversations or how I feel afterwards (I feel fine), but mainly because I think it can stand in for interactions with other people, like people on this coast or friends I haven't spoken to in ages. Maybe it gets in the way of potential friendships. Maybe I should pick up the phone and call my father every once in a while. Or maybe I'm just neurotic and worry too much.
There you go. Another morning of novel-writing gone. But this was more fun.
Home is where the guest blogger post is or how La Belette Rouge coaxed me out of my blogging cave
She has also tempted me back to blogging by asking me to write a guest post for her August series on the concept of home. It's a rich topic and I gave it a very writing to survive twist.
My post, Home in objects, is here.
Hanging on a curtain
But that isn't the point of this post. I want to apologize for being an absent presence in the blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software I use, every time I have a new post I must export the entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a process that take about half an hour or more. It isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have limited writing time and have to start pursuing freelance work. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that my husband is about to take the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21 furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I would also like to chip away at longer stories and to deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the blog format.
I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way or another. In the meantime, please don't take it personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be present in my own life, figuring out a way to get beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.
Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June 2009.
Making it (slightly less) funky
I was tentative at first, hid myself behind veils and a false name. Over time, the veils slipped away, I walked out from behind the curtain, showed my face to the light, revealed my name and purpose. And being seen is ok. It's good. I want people to know me for who I am, for who I was, to keep the secrets from defining me.
Because the secrets don't define me. Even better, after seeing the light of day, after being transformed into stories, they have become almost irrelevant, forming and transforming experiences, important ones, but not the core of who I am.
Visitors to this Web page, however, may have a different impression. In the interest of shaping writing to survive to better reflect reality and also to bring a more professional feel to the page, I have made a few changes. They're subtle — a new tag line, slightly different selections in Excerpts from Life, a more complete look to the food writing page, which I've renamed Kitchen Detour. Most of the old stuff is still here, stories of angst, secrets revealed, but you have to dig a little deeper to find it.
Next post: Crumbling beneath the Formstone. Or something along those lines, with a departure from post titles derived from pop music.
(Image: Mirror, Little House by Jennifer Trinkle, 1986.)
Will blog for squirrels
Nora, researching a blog post.
The writing to survive household is traveling this week and next, from DC to MD to DE to NJ and back. In the meantime, Nora, our Russian Squirrel Hound, will be filling in. Or something like that. Expect a photo post or two.
P.S. -- People googling my name: You are freaking me out.
Baby, stick around
Thanks to washwords, Koe Whitton-Williams, tricia, Dori, Karen, Bobby Revell, Jennifer D., Melinda, Lorenzo, Candy, Ashe.Selah, lydia, timethief, SmallWorldReads, John Folk-Williams, and Jim for your encouraging words and comments. Your support makes the difference.
Here's a bit of writing inspired by the prompt "Alright, fine. Let's hear your explanation." Well, inspired by that and by reading my grandmother's burn notebooks, written during my grandfather's long hospitalization, where her anger over his vices and infidelities comes through, clear and Mercurochrome-bitter. I couldn't bring myself to change the names; they are too good to be fictional.
I just went to the track to look at the horses, to watch them ripple around the oval, to see their hooves beat the dust into red clouds. But once I got there, the action sucked me in. Before I knew what my feet were doing, I was standing in front of Les’s booth to place my bets. The air was heavy with money and I was feeling lucky. I’d win enough to pay off the rest of Atlee’s mortgage or maybe just enough to buy a smooth fifth of whiskey. Or even score a downpayment on a new washing machine for you, Vi.
Then I ran into Williard, who had a full flask and offered me a swig or three. Maybe the alcohol clouded my judgment. Maybe I couldn't see what an amateur that jockey was, but I think the race was rigged, that somebody paid him out to fall off the horse. Or maybe they slipped the little guy a Mickey, I don’t know. The end result is that I lost. The flask made a few more visits to my lips and I didn’t feel like going home just yet anyways.
You and the girls were at the cottage and I was planning on sleeping at the empty Tuxedo Park house, but then I remembered Molly. Molly with the blonde hair and long legs, Molly from the Tip Top Club in Salem, a nice easy-going girl. The Mustang knew the way from the track to the bar. It’s no coincidence that they call that car a Mustang. It has all the bucking power and smarts of a horse. It knows where to find the watering holes, knows the trail back home, too.
After I left the Tip Top, I was exhausted, so I took a snooze in my ride. That’s where I was last night, sleeping in the Mustang.
You can ask Molly if you don't believe me.
So real you can taste it
Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).
And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.
But what do you really know?
Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or another photo to continue the ruse?
How would you feel if I was actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This "Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and bones person out of ethereal imagination.
And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been reading full-blown literary lies à la Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).
Would you feel betrayed?
Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that, though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and trust your gut. There were times in high school and college when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My mother believed the stories about my solo nights, even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside the Little House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their place for the night." "That's exactly what I thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness from my college boyfriends, created a protective distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative strangers.
Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings. Attempting to be good is a life-long process.
There is a difference between making things up to avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and sometimes the lies we tell in our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog tale is well-told, the characters believable, the created world tangible, so real you can taste it, does it matter if it actually happened? How would you know if it did?
We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world, want to believe that everyone is who they present themselves to be. For the most part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …
There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every day, who have created fiction under the guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to day existence, may even include some pieces of fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the facts have been turned inside out.
Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is playing, having fun being someone else. The character that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.
And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching across the ether from blogger to blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these circumstances, does the truth matter?
I'm still trying to figure that one out.