Eat, Drink, Breathe, Blog

I realized too late after starting to write a blog how valuable anonymity really was. Of course, I am grateful for my family and friends reading my shit and supporting my writing. Considering they make up 99% of the people who read my blog, who am I to fucking complain? Well, me. It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. What's the worst thing about my lack of anonymity? It's not the fear of hurt feelings. Fuck people's feelings. If you don't want to hear the truth, then don't read what the hell I have to say. It's not the fear of revealing personal information and thoughts to those who have the power to use it against me. You can't do anything to me worse than what I do to myself. No, the worst thing about being an un-anonymous blogger is having to hear the following statements constantly:

"So, are you going to blog about this?"

"Oh no, this is so going to be in your blog tomorrow!"

"Why don't you blog about it."

When I hear these statements tumble forth out of people's mouths I want to pummel them to a bloody pulp with my laptop. And I would, too, if that wouldn't mean getting blood all over my keyboard. Did you ever try cleaning blood out from between those grooves? It's fucking impossible.

I can't even pinpoint why those comments irritate me to the core the way they do. I think somewhere in there, deep down, I have a loathing about being a "blogger" in the first place. Such that writing a blog, and having it called to my attention that I am the writer of a blog, just serves as a reminder of all the ways I have failed. My dreams, they are dead. This is the evidence.

I don't mean to give the impression that I think that blogging isn't legitimate writing. I understand that it can be. Lord knows, some of my blogs are mosaics, the imagined pottery of my soul painstakingly broken and pieced back together into something tangible and coherent. I work so hard at it. And despite the fact that I am never wholly happy with the product of my labors, I'm not completely embarrassed by it either. I knew since I was 8 years old that I had a disease. I knew that I was heartsick and the only medicine for that malaise was writing. Write, write, write. I just had to write. My thesaurus was my bible. I lived and breathed and drank and ate from that buffet of words. I bled the alphabet. Letters streaming out of every pore, every fiber. That is what it means to be a writer. To live by the words and wait impatiently for them to save you.

Sometimes I hear the word "blog" and the way it's said makes me cringe internally. Blog. It's a dirty word. As if writing a blog makes you an egotistical asshole or a silly little girl. Maybe, it does. Sometimes I think, "But what I'm doing is different. It's not the same as that lame-ass blog, or this desperate, boring one. I am answering a calling. I am fulfilling my obligations to the self." But I don't know if this is true. Perhaps, it's just my way of avoiding the truth. Namely, that I've failed. I'm relegated to the position of "girl who writes an on-line diary". This is the pathetic culmination of my dreams. I suck at dreams. Everything I touch turns to shit in my bare hands. I'm like the anti-thesis of Midas, I suppose.

You know what, though? Fuck it. I can't stop now. I'm not saying I'm a great writer. I'm far from that. But I am a writer. I think that's just something inherent, it comes with you when you're born, like my hazel eyes, gloomy disposition, and BRCA2 mutation. My work just isn't done, not until I'm dead. Writing, for me, isn't about respect, recognition or success. Those things would be nice, sure. But they aren't the goal or I would surely have stopped a long time ago. Writing opens me up, it lets me breathe, it allows me to unleash overwhelming emotion from beneath the breastbone. Beneath it all I have a calling to be understood, to be truly and fully known. Fuck anonymity. This is me in all my shame and imperfect glory. And then I realize that maybe, just maybe, that's why people ask the question, "Are you going to blog about this?" They, too, want to be known. Even those who don't write want to be a part of something permanent and tangible. They want their actions to mean something, to make ripples that travel out and out from their little pond into a bigger body of water. Of course, I understand that.

This is my blog. It's a fucking little thing in the face of all that exists, all that's come before, all that will come. But it's mine, it's all I fucking have. This is how I breathe. I can't let go.