I had one of those weekends where I think about killing off my blog, because I am in a place where rage and pain and frustration mount, and I can’t seem to use the one therapy available to me — writing. This is where a private journal is better; yet I seem unable to write without an audience.
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Gimme your body
Gimme your mind
Open your heart
Pull down the blind
Gimme your love gimme it all
Gimme in the kitchen gimme in the hall
Art for arts sake
Money for Gods sake
Art for Arts sake
Money for Gods sake
I had one of those weekends where I think about killing off my blog, because I am in a place where rage and pain and frustration mount, and I can’t seem to use the one therapy available to me — writing.
This is where a private journal is better; yet I seem unable to write without an audience. As much as I belive in art for art’s sake I can’t seem to practice it, I need to send my words off to someone to have them worth saying.
Blogging is a double-edged sword. We send our words into the vast semi-permenant public record that is the internet, but eventually, we all must deal with the fact that from the click of the ‘publish’ button, our thoughts and deeds are public, and can, possibly, be tracked back. Even anonymous bloggers know this; look at Waiter Rant, who had to take his ‘tip jar’ down because it might compromise his anonymity.
Those of us who blog under a known name, real or trackable back to us, invariably confront the fact that people we know may read us. Family, friends, work, parents.
My mother reads this space. Eventually, my daughter will find it, as soon as she gets bored googling up obscure playmobile toys and decides to google daddy.
The audience constrains us. Things I might say, behind a curtain of anonymity with no names or dates, now, ever and always, I must think about. Who might this hurt? Is this someone’s secret? Am I free to speak? And this becomes a spiral, tighter and tighter, til sometimes I cannot move my fingers, trapped in some fugue state, paralyzed by thought and unable to create.
Days like this, I think, shut it down, it’s past it’s expiration date.
Fortunately, when I think this, I don’t reach for the delete key. At best I think ‘take it down’ and move the published files aside. The database that contains all this work, and that of other bloggers, is safe, and backed up. So if I again succumb to the desire to make it go away, the few ounces of treasure in all this won’t cease to be.
But I stare at ecto‘s compose window, more and more as time goes by, with empty, impotent frustration, my words filtered down to nothing. I post links and pictures and funny quips, meaningless film reviews, because I feel I must say something.
Mute frustration rules my life in many ways. Words I cannot speak. My words become the match that ignites a tinderbox of trouble. Yet words are the life-blood of me, my interface to the world, my only effective tool to understand the universe. I think in language. I often think in dialog.
I am trapped in my own head, unable to break free, the tools that helped now, I fear, hurt. There is so much I want to say, and so little I can.
I am so there.
I need an anonymous blog that can only be read by total strangers plus maybe a very very tight group of friends that I trust completely. But the mechanics of that, and the risks entailed, just keep me from doing it.
And a completely anonymous blog that nobody knows about seems, well, kinda pointless. I might as well just blog to my hard drive. Writing for yourself is like cooking for one. When I cook just for myself, it’s always a huge steak and a tomato salad. Boring. I wouldn’t serve it to anybody.
cooking for one
Yeah that’s it. Cooking is about sharing, about pleasing others. I mean, I enjoy the process, I enjoy using a knife and heating a pan, but I don’t cook to eat, I cook to share. When I’m alone, it’s a salad or a tuna sandwich.
Blogging is like that. It’s sharing that motivates the blogger. That’s how blogging is different from keeping a journal or diary. You can’t be a blogger without an audience.
What, is this the latest piece of the blogosphere zeitgeist? I’ve been facing the same damn problems. I still enjoy the blog, on occasion, but lately the issues I most need to vent on are the things I just can’t say i my blog, because I *know* they’ll be read by the peole these thing concern there aznd I just don’t need to make things worse. Arrgh.
I have a mailing list where I sometimes vent stuff that I can’t go into in my blog, but the people there are such flakes that I don’t tend to look for advice from them, you know?
Gah.
Hey Greggg, I need to steal blogosphere zeitgeist for an entry title. B^)
Yeah, Ray and I and others have talked about this quite a bit; the difference between anon and ‘out’ blogging. You can be someone like Doxy or Trance and have a blog most people can’t connect to you, and have *some* freedom, but still blog about your life, or you can be truly anonymous and have complete freedom, but no credit, or you can be one of us ego-monsters who wants all the credit; but we then face all the blame and constraint and self-censorship.
I’m not sure there’s a good balance point; any way you go, your audience starts to define you. But still, ya gotta bitch about it. B^)
My latest find- who runs websites and spanks beautifully- showed me his pets websites. As he wants to make me a pet, I asked do I get one too?
He told me instantly yes, with password protection to areas that I could choose to share or not to share with any and everyone.
While I blog a lot- I also keep some things very personal in a journal. I work off my rage in my pages I don’t share. I take most of my more intense blogs from my journal entries. They are the edited diary.
It’s intriguing to imagine what I’d do with a website. I just might have to take Daddy up on it.
It’s endlessly frustrating. Since the chapbook and the most recent boyfriend, a lot of people know about my site. A couple of friends read it. There’s a hell of a lot I don’t say, so much more I would post about if I felt I could. I do have a locked blog, but I barely use it because I’m so much more comfortable with my regular space. It’s a bitch.
Oh the irony.
Ray’s cooking metaphor keeps coming back at me. It’s a great metaphor. Also kicking around in the back of my mind are variants of what LJ does – some posts are only visible to certain people, and there are times when I wish it were possible to block (for example) all adresses that originate in a certain rural backwater in Europe. I’d want these people not to know these entries were blocked; so if (to take another example) I wrote two entries in a day and one of them was invisible to anyone with an adress in this city or it’s environs, they’d never know that they missed the entry unless some other rat bastard made a point of telling them.
“Somewhere over the rainbow…….”
Yeah, if wishes were fishes. I cannot think of an “anonymous” weblog whose author isn’t known by at least three or four other people, and being anonymous is not really about being hidden from your friends, it’s usually more about stalkers and annoying prurient strangers or – as in my case – pesky legal entities. To anyone close to you it’s always perfectly transparent. which can make anything you write here a bit like the online equivalent of walking around in your house/school/office talking to yourself very loudly, a kind of written tourette’s.
It really is a bitch when you want to grab the neck of some living thing and tear it’s hot steaming flesh away in your hand and you need to let it out and you have to tell someone and you can’t. Find. Anywhere. Private. Enough. I’ve had it happen too. It’s a bitch. I feel for you man.
Buck, my friend Jen went on a vast search for a way to build a multi-tier security system such that categories of posts would set a security level, and then she could register users in specific groups with defined access to the various levels/categories.
And of course, it’s vvery possible to do it. Not even that hard, technically. There are CMS systems like drupal that can do it, and LJ has a similar ability.
Only.
Only why? Blogging is abolut being public. Why put that much effort into a system that’s going to need to be maintained and that makes your readers do extra work?
I always hit that. Blogging is about being public. being anonymous is one thing, but being private isn’t really blolgging.
But yeah, there is the need to rend and tear and kill, and other than screaming it at the bathroom wall, what do you do with it?
Well, you can always set up a parallel invisiblog (http://invisiblog.com/) or similar. That way you would get it somewhere where you might be found and read, but still don’t have to admit to it being you.
Not a solution, just a thought.
The big problem comes when someone you trust completely becomes traitorous, as I’m dealing with from [X].
And, Karl, I never did find a good system for doing what LJ does. the freeware tech is Not Yet There, unless oyu use the LJ interface, which I wasn’t interested in.
Invisiblog seems complicated, plus you can’t take your posts down once they’re up there, which seems like it would take balls of steel.
A public but anonymous blog, with no names, no locations, no nothing to identify you, seems like the only solution for what I want to do.
If I do it, I’ll be sure to tell, oh, none of you.
Yeah, sam, IMO LJ sucks. And I still struggle with the idea of secure blog; blog should be public.
Wow. Random luck brought me here, but it’s an amazing post and certainly speaks to me. I’ve certainly struggled with it. Having gone from anon blog to my husband reading to the possibility of children. I didn’t want it that way. Struggling to make it work since then.
I love this post though. Love how writing is your release, your art, yet the spiral that binds you as well. One of my favorites that I’ve read in a long time.
DbD, you know, nothing’s changed and everything’s changed in the many months since I posted this entry.
Mute frustration rules my life in many ways
The anger is less, though with it has gone much of the creative fire. And I still can’t kill off this blog even when I profoundly want to, some days.