Monday, March 12, 2012

Evolution of a Diarist (not to be confused with a diarrhea-ist, which is similar with regards to force, but only sometimes with regards to content and location)

Let me explain:

I've had a LiveJournal blog, which I began at my first girlfriend's behest, since I was eighteen years old, and it has served me well.  I'd like to talk about it, but first I have to go back in time, to LJ's predecessors in my life, to the beginning of my need to express myself in words.

I had a natural inclination to write when I was a child.  I remember when I was only six and seven years old, lovingly, carefully, like a watch-smith with her magnifying glass and tiny tools, transcribing scenes from movies, turning the pictures into words on the page, sometimes rewriting plots and embellishing my favorite moments, making them my own.  I remember writing tales about animals, about everyday objects; nothing lacked magic, nothing was storyless.

I always kept a journal growing up.  The first one I remember had a puffy, yellow plastic cover and a cheap gold lock and key.  I remember it not so much for what it contained but for what it revealed.  When I was nine years old and in the fourth grade, the man who would become my stepfather broke into it.  I remember seeing it beside his ashtray on the side table next to his recliner.  The key glittered atop it, and maybe I imagined it, but it shined guiltily like the eyes of a Labrador Retriever that allows thieves to burglarize a house in return for a good rubdown.  I remember how my skin burned as Roger, a nicotine-stained smirk on his face, quoted lines at me: "When I walk into a room, I want to make all the boys swoon." I can still remember the way he laughed, how each ha-ha-ha sunk deeper inside me, every one burning like an ember.  It was then that I realized I would not have any privacy, that words written down could be found and used against me.

To my knowledge, I stopped journaling for a few years, funneling my creativity into school book reports and assigned stories.  But when I was thirteen, I started two journals, dedicating one to poetry and the other to dream analysis.  I wasn't scared of my secrets being found out because I was tired of having to keep everything inside; it took more energy to keep myself away from the page than to pour myself out.  It was around that time my stepfather's abusiveness piqued.  He had by then made everyone in the family feel smaller.  He'd thrown my mother down the stairs while my sister, brother, and I pretended to sleep through yet another explosive argument.  He'd kicked me in the back and chased me through the woods in what I thought would be the last minutes of my life.  He'd called my sister so many names, I was sure she'd forget her real one soon.  And he'd turned my younger brother from a sweet, genial boy into a dangerous, drug-abusing stranger.  I wrote the following poem, half-way hoping, I think, Roger would find it, and we could finally end all pretenses of safety and security in that house.

What He Says


Hurdles come and they go
Don't deal with your problems
Bottle up the pain
Forget expressing yourself
No psychiatric help
You're wrong all the time
I'm always right
Angry fits and flying fists
Foul language pouring out
Don't waste your time
You'll never be anything
I hate you
I don't need help
You need to get a life
Get some friends
I am perfect
Why can't you be like me
What's wrong with you
Nothing's wrong
I'm just fine

Later, when I began realizing I was attracted to females, I penned poems about secrets, about hiding, about feeling different, about wanting to be normal, loved, and accepted.  I wrote love poems to crushes, wondering if I'd ever be able to share them.  I half-hoped my family, from whom I'd hidden this part of myself, would find my poetry journal and make me share, but my siblings were more interested in stealing CD's from my room than anything else, my mother never showed any interest in anything of mine, and my stepfather was ordered to leave the house when I was fourteen after it was discovered he'd ruptured my brother's eardrum by throwing him across the kitchen and into the stove.  So I kept my poems to myself.

I began my dream diary because my dreams intrigued me.  During the day, I was a nerdy, bookish girl with few friends who spent much time reading in bed and sitting in the woods observing deer and murmurs of starlings.  But at night, in my sleep, life unfurled in more vibrant shades.  Animals shimmered and spoke; aliens landed in my backyard and spoke to the foxes living in the woods surrounding my house; when I ran, I could fly.

When I was sixteen, a friend gave me a dream dictionary for my birthday, and my dreams started making a lot more sense.  Soon, I couldn't pretend they were just stories; I couldn't ignore their messages.  And as I slid deeper into teenagerhood, my dreams changed.  Some of them terrified me.  When aliens came, they abducted me.  When animals talked, they whispered threats in raspy voices.  I hurt people.  I slit throats and ran from shadows.  I woke up not knowing who I was, what I was, when I was.  Everything gleamed in the dark of my dreams; everything had teeth.

Sometimes I woke up crying out of fear.  Other times, out of disappointment; I'd finally come out to my family, and they'd embraced me--but when I woke, I'd realize it was a dream, that I was still worried my twin sister would call me a freak, that my mother would disown me.  I'd dream of holding hands with my best friend, of an innocent kiss on the cheek, waking to find myself in a world where Matthew Shepard's blood still stained the air, where Brandon Teena's were murdered everyday and people were not only fine with that, but relieved.  I filled hundreds of looseleaf pages with sweaty scribbles and tears because words were a refuge.

It was vital that I write.  There were things I did not want to tell others and things that needed to be said but had to wait.  There were things I didn't understand but that I itched to explore; words spilled from me like beams of light cutting through the darkness, like crumbs that could lead me home.  They were ever-ready, and I was grateful.  But gradually, they became too many and too heavy.  Not to mention too messy!  My handwriting had steadily deteriorated since I'd graduated from the mandatory handwriting classes of early grade school where the impeccability of a letter's curves was held in high regard; as a teenager with a wild need to express myself and an agile mind, I had no intention of slowing down to cross my t's or dot my i's.  Fortunately for me, a new age had dawned.  America Online, email, AOL Instant Messenger, and a mandatory keyboarding class converged to make me a nimble typist and savvy internet user.  And so began my relationship with online journaling.

Its benefits were immediately apparent.  No longer did I have to spend countless minutes sifting through pages of sloppy scrawl to relive a dream, poem, or memory from months past.  I could simply pinpoint the month or tag and quickly link to a neatly-typed entry.  And because I could type a good deal faster than I could write, I found I was less anxious while writing, less worried that I would miss a word or idea.  My fingers could almost keep up with my brain.

I liked, too, how I could share my entries or make them private.  In this way, I learned about audience, purpose, and the other fundamental building blocks of writing.  I chose my words carefully, wanting my audience to take me seriously, to listen, or to laugh.  I wanted my readers to feel something, to care. Finally, I wanted to share my words; after so many years of tucking them into drawers, smashing them between covers, and keeping them under lock and key, I could no longer keep them to myself.  They were aching to get out, and blogging online allowed me to breathe more deeply than I ever had.

But times are changing again.  I'm changing.  LiveJournal is not the same kind of platform as Blogger or Wordpress.  It's like an electric typewriter, straddling the old and the new, trying to keep writing simple in a world that is growing more complicated.  I want to keep it...for my private entries, for the secrets I'm nervous to reveal even to myself, for vitriolic, childish rants that would make the devil himself flush with shame.

I'd like to use this new blog to test my mettle as a writer.  To be honest, hard times, existentially, have fallen upon me, and I have wondered for the past several years if I have what it takes to write, if I even have the right to call myself a writer, despite its immanence in my life, despite years of writing-centered learning and teaching.  Can I rebirth my writing-self with this blog?  Can I garner an audience, even an audience of one?  Will anyone want to read my words?  Should that even matter?  I don't know, but I'm willing to find out.  Because my life--not my heartbeat or breath, but my purpose--depends on it.  Because once again, I'm feeling lost, wondering what my days are all about, and I'm hoping words will save me...from a life of settling, of fear, of doubt, of apathy.  If you are reading this, perhaps you, too, are looking for rescue.  Maybe we can save each other from meaninglessness, stranger.  Maybe words can be that powerful.  I sure hope so.