Champagne and Socks

Oddly that is a question I find myself asking a lot lately, about a lot of different things. I guess, when you’re doing a major declutter in your life, it can’t help but spill over into all aspects of your life, because when you’re asking yourself why you need to keep or why you value X, or what’s its point, you train yourself into thinking that way. And so now, I am decluttering in a lot of places. Today for example, I unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists cause, well yeah I can continue hitting delete straight away or I could not have to look at them at all and give them any part of my time.

So, like, what’s the point? Of this journal. That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. I think I’ve mentioned here before how I am struggling to figure out what this place is going to be. And I also talked about some of the constraints. And with the immediacy of Twitter, it turns out, a heck of a lot of what you want to say really can be distilled down to 140 characters. I’m just over 39 000 tweets over at Twitter.

So this last weekend I’ve been really thinking about this blog and about blogging and what it all means/meant to me. If I put aside the fact that blogging on the internet is, yo, blogging on the internet and people who like you and people who very much don’t like you can read it and might use things against you (and have) and that now I am the face of a small business, and that changes how you interface with the internet …

I originally started blogging wow, more than ten years ago at Diaryland. At that time I was writing – fiction and non fiction – and I wanted a mechanism to ensure that I would write *something* every day. And I also wanted a space to be self reflexive, in the hope of creating material in the old “write what you know” vein. And then I moved to LiveJournal, I can’t remember why but I think it was because I’d started to move into the Aussie small press scene and some people I knew were there. And somewhere along the way I began to feel that actually the genre I am good at is blogging. About me. It was the area that I got the most positive feedback from and what came most easily to me to write. The nonfiction side of things expanded and I got published and paid for pieces I was writing, and that was nice, and actually I didn’t much rate my fiction. But I began to feel like my blog needed a cohesive narrative. I found that reading other people’s naval gazing got tedious when they repeated cycles of behaviour, obliviously. There’s only so many rounds of watching someone walk up to a hot stove, put their hand on it and then cry about the pain, you know? So I guess I began to work harder on what I was writing, but also on me. It was a feedback loop where I wanted to learn from what I was experiencing and I wanted to document it. And I wanted to grow.

So there was that whole time when I was blogging the wanting to have a boyfriend, the having the boyfriend, the drama of the having the boyfriend gone wrong and the recovery of that back to me. What’s that, like, 8 years or something? Wow. And ouch. And it was, you know, good times. There was the ups, and the downs, and the tears and the victories. And I’m making light of it but I made a lot of really good, long lasting friends on LJ. A lot of people I met through fandoms and we kept each other even though our shows ended. There are people I only know through my blog, but who I think really know me, and have been really big support during my (hopefully) lowest points.

And that kinda brings me to here. I remember once asking on my LJ what happens when you finally get what you want/finish all the tasks on your to do list. And the answer was something like, you sit on your back stoop, sip a cup of tea and watch the sunset.

But that’s like really hard to blog.

I’m really happy in life. Right now. And have been for a good while now. Yes, I’ve had a couple of bouts of depression and burnout and stuff but those were related to specific events rather than “wow my whole life sucks, I have nothing I really want”. I found a really great guy, like beyond great, and we have this unbelievable relationship – he likes all the stuff I like (which is annoying when it’s weird things like black jelly beans that I normally don’t have to share with people – ‘cept I like sharing with him) and we just get on well. We hardly fight. We don’t need to fight – if you really love someone, don’t you just want them to be happy? And if this thing here that you have (object/time/effort/shirt off your back) will make them happy, wouldn’t you just give it to them? He understands me in a way noone else ever really has and he knows how to deal with me when I’m not in my best moments in life (aka depression/anxiety/OCD loop). How do you write about that stuff every day on a blog? “It’s another perfect morning here in lalaland…”

Which means I guess that your perspective either gets finer detailed or larger. And leaves me in a quandary. I *want* to write, I want to write on a blog every  day – it’s my habit and it makes me feel like I am still a writer. And the answer feels almost like I need to push myself into talking more about what it’s like to be me in terms of the 35 year old woman trying to get a start up business to succeed and balancing all those other things like a full on day job, the family thing and so on. I worry that talking *more* about my business pushes me away from one of the core things I loved about Livejournal which is interacting with all my friends there. I also worry about talking specifics about publishing – that whole giving away your secrets thing, versus giving back and so on. I’m still finding a balance here but I feel like I need to give myself permission one way or the other – either to talk about the big things or talk about the little things.