The Perils of... Blogging

Well, I realized I was in trouble when I started to create another blog, this one, to discuss not blogging. It isn't exactly an oncoming train situation - me tied to the tracks like poor Pauline of yore - but I did feel very, well, tied to the blogosphere, and suspicious of my motives for letting it tie me down. I kept asking myself why I was blogging.

I have been preoccupied with that question for a while now. Originally I thought this was a way to connect with family and friends. The fact is, however, my blogging isn't really reaching anyone that I actually know. No else I know in real life blogs (apart from my son, who does so for business purposes) and only one or two friends/family read my blog. Recently my son said I should keep blogging even though he didn't really read what I wrote because, as he reassured me, his sister and he "will want to read it when [I] die."

We both laughed at this. One of my mantras, thanks to Plato, is Practice Dying, and I truly want to be a real and consoling presence for my children after death. A blog in its own way feels like it offers a kind of immortal legacy.

Even with that agenda, however, there seemed to be an increasing intensity to my engagement in blogging. For awhile I suspected my preoccupation with blogging was about my loss of identity as a parent - the basic empty nest syndrome. And I do miss my children, miss the joyful innocence of their childhood, the clarity of purpose for my life. However, that didn't entirely address the question of why I threw myself into the blogosphere starting in... February, as it turns out.

The other day my daughter asked me what made me happy (apart from our family). Walking and writing were the top two things that came to mind. But what is it exactly about writing in a blog, so very publicly? Why blog when I could just as easily write (as I have done for years) in my personal journal?

It finally occurred to that I wanted to be heard. I am a textbook introvert. Solitude is my truest companion (well, that and Karma the Beloved Dog) and to a certain extent I think the blogosphere is the perfect venue for an introvert. Being a compassionate and thoughtful listener is crucial to my profession, but I think I wanted not just to listen, but to be heard.

And yet, how many times have I said that the most important audience we have is... ourselves? I do believe we must learn to truly hear ourselves first and foremost.

I am in perpetual awe of how we can know and not know certain things at the same time.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the Virtuality Continuum, as shown below.


Although general consensus seemed to be that most of us live in Mixed Reality, what I began to notice was that for me Virtual Reality was trumping the Real. I found I was often more energized and focused in Virtual Reality than in my actual life. I even began to notice I preferred Virtual Reality over my real life. Soon I was criticizing myself for being so avoidant, for being guilty of what that sweet moral scourge Ella Wheeler Wilcox described as how:

We flatter those we scarcely know
We please the fleeting guest
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.

I haven't wreaked havoc on anyone's life so far, but blogging has certainly curtailed some of my other obligations. Phone calls not returned, letters unanswered, presents not sent (even one from Christmas!), appointments not kept... the real world has taken a back seat for a few months now, to my very great surprise.

At the end of the post in which I wrote about the Virtuality Continuum, I quoted a poem from e. e. cummings, the last line for which was "and death I think is no parenthesis." I read this again a few days ago and suddenly realized that February, which was when I started actively blogging, was the year anniversary death of a student I was close to.

It was a tragic, unnecessary death. I have grieved it time and time again. And each time it takes me by surprise. I do not believe I was responsible for her death, nor could I have prevented it, but the power it has to provoke questions of the meaning of my life does not dim. I now realize blogging - virtual reality - was my refuge from the feelings I could not re-admit to conscious awareness. The blogosphere allowed me to hide from myself, even as I suspected I was a refugee.

Somehow realizing that has tipped a balance for me. It is almost always better to feel than to avoid feeling. I think I'm ready to return to real life. That may mean I spend less time in virtual life.

To blog/not to blog. I'm remembering the lines from T. S. Eliot that I love so much, Teach us to care and not to care. Perhaps my invocation in the blogosphere is Teach us to blog, and not to blog.

TSE's next line, of course, is Teach us to sit still.

That sitting still, the stillness that speaks, is what I know I need to do more of. I need to hear my sorrow, and let it be an honoring of my student's life, and an honoring of all the very big questions death always raises.

Perhaps that will permit blogging to be a choice, rather than an escape.