On Women Blogging (I)

This is a response to something Ptitsa wrote. I love the fact that for the second time, perhaps unintentionally, she’s gotten a kind of reaction out of me that requires a much deeper insight that I have been having on things lately. A kind of insight that even my shrink couldn’t get out of me (maybe that’s why I stopped seeing her, after all). You know, the funny thing is that I wrote “I love her for the fact...” and had to go back and rephrase it for the fear of sounding inappropriate, since I do not know her… or rather, my knowledge of her is in the form of second degree subjectivity (and yes, I just made that one up – I don’t think there’s a term “second degree subjectivity” although I’ll be as elusive as some of my math textbooks and assume that the meaning of this term of mine is somewhat obvious and self-explanatory). And yet, the riddle she has left me with is not of a kind that can be figured out by consulting the aforementioned textbooks and working it through the steps of some known algorithm (I wish there were a lot more things in life that could be solved through algorithms).

She writes:

I've been thinking about what we do and do not say to each other. I have no agenda with my blog. It's just a release. It's a way to talk when I haven't got an interlocutor. Thus, I'm as candid and stupid as I feel the need to be; what I censor is what could get me in trouble and what I haven't got the time, courage, or ambition to try to write out. But I'm wondering about a different class of revelations. We write about dissatisfaction with our lives and our bodies. But we really don't give enough details. […] Yet I feel that my voyeurism is not motivated by competition or Schadenfreude; rather, the lack of detail in so many of our posts is a barrier to real intimacy.

For the past week I’ve been thinking about writing and my own writing in particular, both in terms of form and content. In fact, I’ve done little else during this week and yet, for some reason, despite the face that I left a world of other things that needed to be done neglected; I don’t consider this time wasted at all. Because the fact that I started writing again is an indicative of sorts that I am not quite ready to give it up yet, even though I have no expectations or any delusions that what I (may) write has any value whatsoever.

When I started this blog back in 2004, I did not know where I was going with this (not that I have a clue now either). I was very unhappy then and yet my posts of that time reflect only a tiny fraction of how desperate I was. Since then, my life has undergone a number of drastic changes, which although documented in some shape or form, lack many details as far as this particular blog is concerned. I was married, but I hardly wrote about what it was like. I left my husband but I never really went at lengths in explaining the true reasons of my leaving. I went back home and spent a year there in recovery and “self-discovery” and yet nothing in this blog truly describes what that year was like. I had an affair with a married man – an event that was never mentioned anywhere in here yet the details of which were carefully documented in a private journal. I spent months in what I call “sober debauchery”; I had a long, difficult, painful and ugly process of recovering from a decade-long eating disorder; I moved to Richmond; I started a new relationship, etc…

And yet, this blog doesn’t really reflect any of that, let alone daily details of my personal life, the long history of my constant dissatisfaction with myself, the different worries, frustrations and whatnots – in short, my writing here is not really intimate, so to speak. My own personal journals - and I have long stopped writing in a journal altogether, aren't any better at all. And yet, when I go over those earlier posts, when I read those short paragraphs, those little snippets that look kind of like Polaroid shots that actually did find a place in this blog, I remember, very distinctly, what it was like then, what I, Nika, was like. I don’t feel the kind of dissatisfaction that Anna does when she reads over her journal entries. What I was recording then, what I was looking for was a documentation of emotional and at times mental states with some kind of symbols, like a photograph or song lyrics, that would be there, like punctuation marks, to remind me what it felt like and not what it actually was.

If I were a writer (and I am not), I would be one of those difficult ones who would expect too much from their reader. Actually, the biggest criticism that I have received to one of the very few stories that I wrote and actually gave to an uninvolved party to read was just that – I expect my reader to do too much work – most of it, actually, I leave too many blanks, omit too many details. Despite the fact that I do see a certain kind of appeal in it and in the past have sought out that sort writing, this lack of detail, lack of intimacy isn’t entirely a matter of literary style.

The riddle I am facing here is a much more complex – maybe I would even go as far as describing it as psychological, linguistic and even philosophical to an extent. I know that I’m not adequately equipped to give any kind of professional explanation to the issue of how we see ourselves and how, as a result of this, we express and portray ourselves through our writing; and one thing I hate more than anything is self-righteous dilettantism. So I will leave the intellectual pursuits aside. I could, however, at least try to look into myself and seek out answers from within, especially since, as I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve been preoccupied with my own writing for this whole week. But I should make it an entirely new post, for this one is getting too long, plus the boy is awake – I have to go and tend to him.