My Anti-Manifesto (in premature honor of my 4th blogiversary)

I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically as it applies to the blog here as much as anything.  Start small, right?  I have to, because I have no clue who I am or what I want right now, and that’s ok, I think.  It’s been a flux-y few years.

This is the thing, though: I’ve been holding back here for a long time.  I used to love blogging, world be damned, and I still do, I think, though I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of years now in the context of I’d love it if I could get the world to leave me alone about it or maybe I love it, but the fallout isn’t worth it.  Because for some reason I’ve found myself in this position where I’m quite convinced that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to let people know what I really think.

I’m still not convinced it’s not.  But I’ve been trying to convince myself, because I’m tired of being not-quite-happy, and when I look back to the times in my life when I was satisfied with myself, they’ve been times when I’ve let people see who I actually am.  With a big ol’ side dose of fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it, of course.

If I were Tyra Banks, I’d probably describe that mood as “fierce.” And I’d be ready for one of those scary high-fashion photos, 5’4” tall or not.

It’s really hard to let a blog evolve.  I’ve felt for a very long time that I was really locked into a persona, and it feels weird to even think of going off in another direction entirely.  We have readers, dammit, and I figure that y’all have expectations.  And of course, we’re completely identified here, which makes me feel not just naked but as though I’m missing half my skin, and many, many of our readers are family, and how awkward is that?  It’s one thing to worry about what people in blogland might think of you, and entirely another to have it ricochet into real life.

And there are parts of my life I’m not sure I want the whole world to know about, and a certain amount of editing is necessary for survival, but the feeling of having to hold back makes it nearly impossible for me to write anything at all because that’s the way my mind works.  It’s exhausting for me to decide which bits I don’t mind discussing off the blog.  It’s not that I don’t love the people from real life who read this...it’s more that I feel I can’t vent about things that I don’t want to come up in conversation, and I certainly can’t vent about things that might paint them in a less-than-favorable light.  We’ve already had a couple of these incidents in the last couple of years, and it’s just not worth it. 

But I feel muzzled, and cramped, and trapped in a corner.  And it isn’t just the internet v. real life, it’s the nature of the internet, too.  I got tired of the ad hominem bullshit that seems to follow around anyone who dares have an opinion that doesn’t fit with whatever the hell it is that your opinions are supposed to fit with.  What exactly you’re supposed to think varies by bloggy neighborhood, but so far as I can tell, honest debate died an unnoticed death in blogland a couple of years ago. 

I wonder, too, how great an idea it is to have certain personal information out there where Google can gobble it up and potentially spit it back out. 

LOL.  I started this intending to tell anyone who has issues whith who I actually am and what I actually think to go do something anatomically impossible, but I think I talked myself out of blogging.  Which is a shame, because I really do love it.

I’ll have to think on this.

1. so far as I can tell, honest debate died an unnoticed death in blogland a couple of years ago.

   I think it depends on which neighborhood in blogland you occupy (and I don’t mean that as a slam on the left or the right).  Rather, the most populated neighborhoods are those where people only want to hear what they want to hear.

   Certainly the way to get a lot of attention is to be a raving partisan--and if one doesn’t want to be such, I think it is harder to carve out one’s niche.  Certainly it has gotten to be more the case in the last four years.

   Posted by Steven Taylor  on  03/17  at  10:07 AM  from 

2. I understand what you’re saying.  There are many topics I stopped blogging about - partly because I just don’t feel like arguing with people - and partly because of who I perceive my readers to be.  Does that make me sad - yes.  Will it change - maybe. 

   It’s crazy that we start blogging because we want to have more/better conversations with people - then end up editing out the stuff that might lead to those conversations… hmmmm…

   Posted by Beth  on  03/17  at  11:15 AM  from 

3. I don’t mind heated debate or snide troll warbling online, but when someone I know pops up with something from the blog, it’s kind of like a backstab, especially as I blog anonymously.

   As for myself, I have been missing your “fire without restraint” approach, even when I disagree with your position, because you usually have something interesting to say.

   As you know, there are alternatives…

   Posted by caltechgirl  on  03/17  at  12:59 PM  from 

4. I’m with you, too. I’ve thought about it over the last year or so - that I’ve stopped posting about certain things because my in-laws read now or I’m too tired to engage in debate over some opinion I’ve spouted, etc. And so my blog is what it is and I can live with that.

   Posted by jen  on  03/17  at  03:38 PM  from  Northern Virginia

5. Deb, I hear you. It’s frustrating as hell to feel like you have to pass everything through that internal censor.

   I have several neighbors who read my blog— two of them daily readers— so I do have to watch what I say. Unfortunately. Once in the early days of my blog I got a phone call from a neighbor who was angry with one of my blog posts. Or “angry” doesn’t cover it, “spitting roofing tacks” would be more like it. To this day I don’t understand how any reasonable person could’ve been offended by that post, but he wasn’t being reasonable about it. I stopped blogging for six weeks, and came just that close to giving up blogging altogether.

   Fortunately I fell early into a blogging schtick I can live with: I blog about myself, my weird imagination, and the world around me as seen through the lens of that imagination. Still requires some self-censorship, but not nearly as much as if I were frequently blogging about sex, politics, religion, or any of the other usual blogospheric “third rails.”

   Plus, somehow I’ve been unusually fortunate in the (small) readership my blog has drawn: decent, civil people every one of them, and in nearly two and a half years of blogging I can count on the fingers of one hand the truly nasty comments I’ve received.

   Nonetheless, even such self-censorship as remains is galling. Sometimes I wonder how different my blogging would have been, had I blogged under a pseudonym.

   As for the rest of the blogosphere, yeah, agreed: the longer I hang around (and I’ve been hanging around for 4½ years now) the more it looks like a loose network of echo chambers, and woe betide the pilgrim commenter who violates the local shibboleths.

   Posted by Paul Burgess  on  03/19  at  10:04 AM  from 
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