Again, I wonder what I'm doing with this blog. I've noticed a few things about myself recently with how I relate to this blogging stuff. This blog, its title, the moniker I use, the tone and subject matter, etc. all contribute to creating an identity, an identity that I'm not so sure that I personally relate to for the most part. I think this blog has presented a highly skewed perception of the real person behind all of this stuff.
I don't feel like it's a very good representation of me. I don't feel like I'm really helping people know the real me. Perhaps what I should be doing is using this blog to simply help myself know the real me. Either way, it seems I need to talk about myself more, rather than about the angst that occasionally passes through me.
Everyone mostly sees the troubling issues in my life. Or, if they follow my other blogs, they might see a sample of my sense of humor or what I do for fun. I wonder sometimes if the humor comes out on this blog or not. It is hard to put casual humor across in writing, especially when it's juxtaposed with confusion, anger, depression, cynicism etc. Or is it? Is my humor cynical? Is self deprecating humor cynical? OK, not all of it is self deprecating. Actually, I don't really know how to classify humor. I just know what I find funny.
Anyway, it takes more than just bad humor to know a person. It's obvious that the subject matter of my writing is shaped by my experience, but when do I simply write about the experience as opposed to simply mentioning it as means to convey my feelings toward something. And by doing that, the experience as a story itself is diminished to much less than an anecdote. Obviously, I know what is in my head when I write it; there is a lot of momentum behind it as a thought. But what ends up on the page are a few words that summarize it into an idea that means only a fraction to the reader as it did to the author.
An example, looking back at my last post, my simple statement, "Even though I wore tall black boots and long hair, I still had to conform in some things to keep the peace." carries behind it 20+ years of attitude shaping moments with people, enough that I could probably write a book. And although they were life shaping moments, they all seem too mundane to write about the specifics. So the best I can do is to oversimplify it into boots and hair vs. conformity and piece, assuming that such things carry with it the right cultural information to allow for understanding and bring about a shared experience between the writer and reader. Barring that, I would need to write about a few specific incidents to get the point across. Who knows though? If I started to write about myself more than the angst, those moments might actually get mentioned. But then, I might bore people. Hell, I bore myself sometimes in my own writing.
I haven't had a profound angsty moment since January of this year. Sure, I still have angst but it has really tapered off. A small moment in March and April but nothing even close to what I went through last year. I think that's a great thing! I'm thrilled! But the result is my drive to write things here, which were purely to work out my angst, have diminished. I hardly even journal anymore. Besides, my journaling was never about writing down a journal of my life. It's just free association writing to clear my head. I would say that 99% of it is garbage.
So I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to push myself to writing things here anyway.
About anything. Make this an honest effort to journal "properly". And just let it free flow more and not put so much effort in editing and presenting a polished post. Not being as articulate in person as I try to be in writing, I have a bit of insecurity about presenting my writing more casual. It's as if I'm over compensating for my slow verbal acuity. I'm actually a bit frustrated by my slow verbal acuity. So, yeah.
But I have been experimenting with making it more casual and off the cuff. Like the way I speak. I say a lot of things that are incomplete sentences; sometimes I don't even complete a word. I say lots of non-sequitur shit sometimes. And sometimes I say sequitur shit that doesn't make any sense. And many times when I comment on blogs and Facebook I'm saying what's on my mind with little editing. Mostly it's cynicism. Although when I've started to comment on blogs I've found myself rambling between many different ideas. I end up deleting most of them because I can't find coherency. I'm really just trying to find words for things that I have never had before. Words I've never let myself have or have always let other people make for me. So in that respect, I could write posts that have broken ideas and incomplete narratives, and jump around and just say shit.
Life is just a big experiment anyway, right? Well I see it that way. At least, I do now. More so than ever.
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