It’s August. This is the month when i start to twitch and my body feels the emergence of a new year. New Year’s Eve was never my “new year” because it’s smack in the middle of school and there’s nothing new about it… maybe that’s because i never finished my finals before NYE. Most years, August would mean a long journey, the closing of my summer project and a long drive across country back to school. Sometimes, this was punctuated with a visit to Black Rock City.
One thing always happens as a new year emerges – the desire to clean. Usually, i’m moving in August. Aside from last year (where i moved in July), this is the first year since ?1992? where i’m not moving in August (in HS, i was either moving homes or moving back from summer camp). Spring cleaning never happens, but moving usually requires cleaning. The problem is that i despise cleaning. Yet, the urge is there. Last night, i walked into my room, cringed and decided to clean some digital bits instead. Of course, one thing about cleaning (physical or digital) is that it means a walk down memory lane.
I’ve had over 12 online journals, diaries, blogs since 1996. They’re really scattered. I’ve decided that it’s time to bring some of them together. I’ve been asking people how their blogging voice evolved, but scouring my own journals was a real wake-up call. I’ve imported a mere fraction of my entries so far, but it’s so startling to hear the different things that i wrote over the years. I wrote about books, i wrote observations from the streets, i wrote about my depression and ongoing health crises. Most of what i wrote was personal. These were, after all, my diaries and journals.
Some of it is outright eerie. I didn’t address 9/11 in writing for various reasons. I had forgotten that i went to visit the mental health clinic on 9/10 because i was dealing with a bout of depression. That day, i wrote:
there’s something inherently wrong about having bitchy, impatient, mean administrators working in the front desk of a mental health department. hrmpft.
I have to wonder about their attitude the next day.
In an attempt to recognize my past, i decided to import almost everything, regardless of my own horrors and embarrassment about the mundane or foolish. Yes, this is a collapsing of contexts and it gives me the shudders. But i kept thinking about a conversation i had with a friend last December. He kept telling me about the importance of these historical artifacts, about how they allow for reflection, both from the writer and the reader. I’ve decided to own my ups and downs and include those entries for posterity, to remind me of where i came from. ::gulp::
I don’t generally worry too much about “collapsing contexts” when it comes to journals. I need a place where I can just put anything that needs putting somewhere, and the overall context that includes them all is just my life. And then, of course, seemingly unrelated things can find new meaning and significance by their proximity to each other. My blog is somewhat like that, and my private journal extremely so. When I want to create more specific context, I can always go do something else, but it feels good to have a place I can write anything.
I also agree that it’s good to have a periodic cleaning/reviewing in one’s life. Happy New Year!
sounds more like a glog: the idea of archiving thoughts and experiences that coorelate with mental physiologic being is a “Glog.”
wonder if that will be the next article next week out of the NY times;-)
year and semester cycles and tone of voice relay all sorts of information about inner being and thoughts.
danah, you are much braver than me. I’m very selective about what I share, online and off, but especially in a public space like a blog. It makes me feel very vulnerable. I really admire your willingness to put so much of yourself in one place.
**hug**
ah yes, i’m fairly new to blogging (less than a year) and i’ve already observed a lot of changes in both my writing style and the topics that i write about. if there’s one thing blogging does to a person, it’s that it enhances personal reflection. anyone who regularly blogs for some time will eventually notice his/her own patterns of thoughts, biases, preferences, and other unconscious stuff.
just like the usual developmental sequence, blogging also develops from pre-personal (e.g. just rants and stuff), personal (e.g. sharing of one’s interiors, personal thoughts and experiences), post-personal (e.g. desire to connect with more people, like-minded or otherwise, and use of blogging superpowers for good). one thing i like about your blog is that you focus more on the post-personal (e.g. social implications of technology, etc…) keep it up. godspeed.
funny how in my interviews, the point of cleaning came up time and again – yes moving is a time of cleaning regardless of how where and why people move… i never thought to ask of digital cleaning and memory lane came up once or twice but rarely… now that i’ve done my last interview, after reading your post, i feel like i missed that big part i should have asked about… damnit :).
as multifasceted as you are, there is so much of you that is a constant theme throughout every face and shape you take, that sometimes it may be useful to collapse like that… i shudder to think that you moved it all into a public space though… i wonder how that feels and will feel some time from now…
love u for your quirky openness 🙂
Part of the problem was that it was always open, it just required some finding. As such, people felt this privileged attitude when they found it and taunted me with that. I’d rather own it upfront. It helps me address it.
i’m glad you’re not moving this august 🙂
Are you sure about doing that(this isn’t some Dr.jekyll and Mr(ms) hyde issue? experimentation on yourself?). What about the future,do you want employers,future friends,strangers to know you too well? I hope you don’t tell too much-some things should be kept to a small group of folks(or just yourself). rEM. people will recall your dirt more than the good,it’s just the way folks are. I know,it’s none of my business but keep some stuff (I would) offline, it’s a wacky world.
“i decided to import almost everything, regardless of my own horrors and embarrassment about the mundane or foolish”
That is scary but then this is what many poets, artists, and novelists do when they turn themselves inside out for others to experience. It’s something I certainly spent a lot of time thinking about when I was younger and wanting to write fiction. I knew it would involve bravery because for my writing to mean anything it would have to have some of my own life in it.
Perhaps you could approach it a la Spalding Gray? Perhaps you could turn it into a book?
Speaking of books, I was just thinking that something you might enjoy is Dorothy Allison’s “Skin: writing about sex, class, and literature”… lot of essays and writings about Alison’s life, writing, and sexuality. It’s hilarious, inspiring, and smart. Allison quotes the author of *stone butch blues* (who she took writing workshops with) as saying “good girls don’t write anything worth a damn”. It’s true.
And Allison provides a lot of guidance about writing about difficulty – particularly difficult life experiences, survival, sexuality, etc. Might be a good read for you now…
Dorothy Allison is one of my favorites! I will never forget seeing her read from Cavedweller. Damn that woman is intense.
I feel that collapsing contexts is a critical enterprise and shows how the schizophrenic logics of postmodernity break down. In a sense, we categorize our lives (e.g., Bowker & Starr), including our identities, but when the connections are made between categories (in a very broad sense) is often when meanings are realized. A deterritorialization of sorts. Bloggers’ content is a record that can provide quite a bit of illumination, as people often “misremember” things, not just for self-presentation/preservation but more generally (e.g., Watergate investigation interviews). The idea of this posted content on a blog further situates the author and her/his relationship to a greater sociocultural context. There are risks in the interpretations by others BUT it gives the content much more purchase with the readership, given the degree to which the author hs a desire to have multiplexed ties to the audience.