On Why I Am Doing This, Anyway
Or, Dan Explains The Drive to Write About Himself
I haven’t written, seriously, in a long time. Personal writing: even less. This, despite a deep, intense, unshakable, inexplicable drive to do so.
It’s a constant battle for me. I’ll sit down to write, or type, and the moment I venture into the realm of even the remotely transparent, loud roareth the Great Dragon of Self-Loathing! And instead of charging forward, confidently staking my claim on the ground of My Life In Words, which is, like, inherently mine, I all too gladly cower.
And so that pesky inner drive turns, like a broken record that wants to be a bicycle wheel.
Much of this lies in my ambivalence toward my own writer’s voice. Much like my irritating still-unshaken inability to endure the sound of my own recorded physical voice: it is mine; it is not objectively terrible, or so I have been told; therefore it fails to logically follow that I find it difficult, at best, to accept it.
Not to mention the bouts wherein I lapse into my own historically typical quasi-innate, prevalent, ostentatious, neologismic dictional suckage exacerbating my torment. Note: Previous sentence is exempt from example by reason of self-parody.
Which causes me to wonder: if I can’t stand my writing, can other people? How about if other people can stand it, but I can’t? What makes my thoughts worth airing for the selective gawking eyes of the Internet? Or is there some point in airing them despite a question of “worth”?
Incidentally, this next section will not answer any of those questions.
A Brief And Painful History
Insert here mentally a quote about learning from/repeating history.
The last time I ever had a blog — as far as something that communicated something directly about myself to the world at large — was in xanga.com’s heyday. I was a fourteen/fifteen/sixteen year old with an affinity for the kind of exuberant, irrelevant, self-indulgent and unintelligibly self-referential posts that you see shorter glimpses of nowadays in the Facebook statuses of enthusiastic young mothers and adolescent ladies-men-in-training. Not that I ever did, or will, belong to either category, I promise.
My “blog entries” — woeful terminological misappropriation! — would frequently consist of long lists of “highlights.” Some of these are useful for piecing together the fast-fading mind puzzle that is my teenagerhood, if only by their tone and mood.
Most, though, have no posterity value, i.e. I have no idea what they mean anymore. I will never remember why fourteen-year-old-me thought “[name redacted for privacy/my dignity]’s email” was so awesome (maybe I did like her after all (probably not)), or why the phrase “I Love Being A Teenager” was so hilarious to me in 2007. Particularly because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t true.
What I resent most is how, intentionally or not, I was keeping inside jokes from Future Me. And worse: being smug while doing so. Future Me - who is now Present Me - despises being on the unknowing end of smug inside jokes.
And yet, blog.
Bringing us back to the question of wherefore then this blog? Particularly given my brutal track record?
Wherefore Then?
While there clearly isn’t much to give my xanga credit for, I will concede one thing. Fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old me had a clear audience in mind (my friends/peers), and — quality be da[r]ned — wrote consistently to that audience. In the process, I cracked open a window into the way that I felt and thought; what was important to me; who I hung out with on the regular; my youthful aspirations, etc. hidden beneath the cringeworthy diction and a horrific affinity for signing off with “laters.”
A grasp of the Way Things Were for me, personally - a nebulous grasp but a grasp nonetheless. More than what I can say for many of the latter years.
But I have a fresh opportunity to cater to Future Me, who is growing older, more forgetful, and more nostalgic, not to mention fatter and grumpier. Memory is one of the few commodities worth preserving that we all happen to trade in. I’d rather not pass up an opportunity to do so again.
If At First I Don’t Succeed
Which brings us to the art of practice. To paraphrase myself paraphrasing someone else: if you want to be good at something, you must first fearlessly and repeatedly suck at doing it.
I love writing. I want to be good at writing. But to get good at writing, I have to be bad at writing. And be willing to be bad at writing. And I have to write a lot more than I’ve written.
Obviously, there’s no point in staying terrible. That is a very real possibility - that you can fearlessly and repeatedly suck FOREVER. (Certain authors come to mind unbidden.) Feedback, training, and so forth are important hands to hold on the journey to Great Authorship. But the fact remains that there is no moving forward without, well, moving forward.
And how better than by putting oneself “out there” with a blog to motivate oneself in the absence of English class or writing occupation to formulate a document of a higher standard of quality requiring forethought and careful composition which brings a tangible measure of transcendent accountability via periodic frequency and external audience?
That’s a totally rhetorical question, by the way. There are probably better answers. But it’s mine, so I’m sticking with it.
Final Thoughts
So. Why a blog.
Like I said: I need to. Whether gift, curse, obsession, genetic predisposition (spoiler alert: all of the above?), God seems to have entrusted me with a strong and unquenchable engine for arranging words into meanings.
I refuse to let my fear of what I’ve done badly in the past prevent me from getting better; hence these bold and warsome (battlesque? strifelike?) affirmations. Thus I stand the precipice of yet another grand life experiment, with hopes of indulging that blasted record-that-would-be-a-tire. And since we’re revisiting metaphors, I think I’m ready to Slay the Dragon (1d9/Confidence modifier +50).
After all, and this is where I tie everything together like I learned to in ninth grade, there are memories to preserve and skills to hone.
Actual Final Thoughts
This finally brings you, the Reader, into the picture.
Is this blog important for me? Absolutely. For you? Not necessarily. But my words will be here for you to read, and possibly enjoy, and think about, and discuss.
And in the process, I would be more than delighted if you find it makes your life a little better or brighter as well.
