A while ago, I took down all of my personal blogs and replaced them with one group blog and this one. I’d love to say that I had some enlightened, smart or funny reason for doing so, but the truth is that I was kind of tired of myself and needed a break from me. I know that is a funny thing to say, and that it reeks of exactly the same sort of navel gazing self-reflection that I was trying to avoid, but it is the truth in as compact a way as I can manage to phrase it.
Over the course of 4 years, I had spread myself all over the internet in an attempt to paint a pretty picture of my life as it was. I wrote in one blog about my daily life as though it were a conflict free sitcom life. Every trial was just comedy fodder and every triumph was Herculean. In another, I listed 5 good things every day, and in a final, more honest one, I secretly recorded every detail of the breakdown of my life and relationship.
When I deleted them, I did it for several reasons. The first was to stop constantly being confronted with all of the things I missed about my old life. The second was because I did not have it in me to write like that anymore. I was hurting, I was growing and I was busy. I wanted to see myself as just who I was at that particular moment and that self was too selfless to write about herself on the internet. The problem with this, of course, is that I am not that person. No one is ever just who they are at any given moment, and that’s a good thing.
After I deleted my blogs, I didn’t give the matter too much thought. I was busy with school and busy in my personal life and I felt good about it. Then, the other day, I revisited my cousin Leslie’s blog for the first time in a while. Reading her writing made me realize two key things. The first is that her talent for writing is unbelievable in its scope and power, and the second is that blogging was more than a means for me to project an image of myself to the world. It was a way for me to work out the things I was trying to understand within myself and a way for me to find my voice.
When I first started this blog I was playing around with finding my poetic voice and I thought this would be a good way to do so. Who knows, maybe it still will be. However, I think that the focus needs to be more on the poetry of everyday life and less on finding the most dense and confusion similes possible.
You see, in my life, there’s poetry every day, only it takes the form of many things. I think this blog might need to do the same. Because, like life and poetry, I take the form of many things and I would like to reflect them here. It won’t ever be as lovely and poised and eloquent as my friends’ blogs, but it will always be me.
You are a much better writer than you give yourself credit for.
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