One of the chief benefits of keeping a journal or a blog (on paper or online) is an ability to encounter your past self on occasion. To see exactly what you were feeling, thinking, obsessing over. My print journals in those Mead composition books from the 90's are as big a mess as my head was in my early 20's. My blog, a decade later, much more coherent and sense-making. I once thought I could be more honest in handwriting--in things meant for no one but my own eyes, but I don't think that's true. As someone closing in, if count the Xanga era, on two decades of keeping a publicly available journal, I actually think knowing that others could potentially read what I write hones my thoughts and observations in a way those composition books never did. I am not embarrassed by much of what I've written online, maybe because in creating a better, more public version of my thoughts, I become a better version by default.
Of course, there is always talk about the realities that social media does not reflect (and this blog, is perhaps just that, a longer form social media.) I try to be honest here, but again, all the messiness of my emotions and thoughts gets cleaned up. But in doing so, it makes the back of house less messy as well, even if you do not always see everything in the frame of the blog. I think about this especially in regard to more personal things like relationships, which I've never hidden from view, but did not always open a wide door in (because really, the details were less interesting to the outside than to myself.) I think as a writer, you put yourself out there in so many ways anyway, especially if you use life as subject matter, so here doesn't really feel any different.
As a writer and artist, I'm always hoping the blog is a glimpse inside the process (or at least a glimpse inside the mind behind the process. ) Initially, before other, shorter, more connective social medias in the aughts, it was one way I participated in community. As people left the blog-world, I kept it more for myself. Here is where I kick the tires. Where I think things out. There's that quote, I think from Flannery O'Connor, about not knowing what you think until you write it. And that is so true of this space, whether it is personal or professional, creative or everyday.
As I've been talking to people about changes--job changes in my case, other life changes for others, we talk about breaking points and cracks in the glass that later lead to those changes. I was skimming through some old entries from later 2018 and may have found one of my own. I feel like that year was mostly a whole lot of numbness and processing my mother's loss the November before, BUT in December of 2018, I distinctly remember having a breakdown at work, crying about how all we had left, as we got older, was loss. I kept asking, after reading 2009 entries, how had I been so happy a decade before, even though I was writing less and in the worst relationship I could have possibly been in? It was random, and strange, and in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. It was a feeling, though my mood improved, that stayed with me all of 2019, manifested in anxiety flare outs and toxic bitchiness, and probably into 2020, though Covid was a strange respite of survival and worry and took focus away from what had building on my own. When we came out of lockdowns and imminent death (well as much as we ever did), so many people looked around and thought, WTF? This is I suspect part of what they call the Great Resignation which I myself am a member. It did not wholly have to do with stretching myself too thin, or my mother's death, or feeling burnt out at work, But all of those things combined lurked like a monster under the bed that at times, felt like it might devour me.
It felt stupid to say things were terrible, because they weren't--not on the surface, but they were definitely not okay. Add in the general state of the world and things were worse. A friend, after patiently listening to me sob for two hours, said she see saw this with everyone our age right now (and shockingly that was well before the pandemic which only intensified it.) As my head clears a bit this past week, I can read through those entries and see the beginnings of what some might call low grade depression, might call a mid-life crisis, might call just living in the 21st Century. I don't know if shifting my life in better directions will help, but it certainly can't hurt. It was a little scary, to pick up the sword and start carving into the monster beneath the bed, but I'm willing to give it a go.
