Blogging

I have thought long and hard about blogging, as a means of self-expression, as an art form, as an excuse to offer unsolicited advice to a silent audience (if one is even lucky enough to attract an audience). And the question I always find myself asking is: what's the point? Ultimately, I reckon, we blog because we are narcissists. Because we think we know the most, or, conversely, because we think we know the least. Useless is a term that has bubbled around this topic. Redundant, unoriginal, self-indulgent.

Still, here I am. Blogging about blogging. 

Blogging torments me because it is something I have never been able to do successfully, with zeal and lengthiness. When I was sixteen, I posted thrice on a blogspot platform I’d dedicated to words—beautiful words, deformed words, words with numerous and simultaneous faces. I could not tell you what those words were today. Then, when I was seventeen, I remodeled said blog into a storage unit for my first failed romance. I uploaded melancholic musings and a collection of half-formed poetry that had possessed me at the oddest hours. Fragments of teenage heartache like: “I was a highway; lean, narrow, a one way ticket to no-man’s land; and you could not stop driving.” I can recite these lines not because they’re memorable, but because they remain in an archive of unpublished drafts, staring at me with loveless, colorless eyes, reminding me of all that I once felt but never had the motivation to polish and share. 

My dad often tells me I should start a travel blog. He is optimistic in that way, and ignorant. Because of course it should be effortless for me to write about doing what I love doing most. Of course the anecdotes, the reviews, the lessons, the warnings should froth on the page like pasta water boiling over, all naturality and heat and science. But alas, what should be rarely coincides with what actually is. To my credit, I have made several attempts to document my travels. Originally, I’d thought it wise to follow a formula. I wrote from the vantagepoint of hostel beds, continental breakfasts, and lively social scenes. Something akin to the headline: “The 15 BEST Places to Stay in Lisbon This Summer (And How to Avoid Tourist Traps!).” I’d hardly managed to complete one paragraph of this rubric before I realized how much I hated myself. The following drafts had more potential. I would write from within junctures—snippets of time that, for some reason or another, had changed me. Moments like when I plunged into the Atlantic in Lagos, combing through seaweed as if it were a mermaid’s matted hair, wrapping my arms around my chest to conceal the somatic effects the cold had on my body, and I realized, as I looked out at the baby blue horizon, at the wall of rock faces which seemed to grow from the sand like ginger roots, how much I hadn’t known that I hadn’t known. But this, too, never evolved beyond a promising idea.

For the past few months, I have been plagued by a vision of myself choking on words, eyes bulging, saliva dribbling down my chin, and no matter how many fingers I thrust into my throat, the words remain there, angry and bloated and unread, until I can do nothing but accept the futility of my survival, and asphyxiate slowly, calmly, like a euthanized dog laying its head down to die. I think this is because I have left behind those idyllic years when I could write simply because I wanted to, for no other purpose than my own satisfaction. When I wrote with my foot on the gas pedal instead of the break.

The trouble is that there are stakes now. There are cruel critics and biased opinions. And every time I prostrate myself before the keyboard, I can’t help but feel the ever-present divide between the published and unpublished, the celebrated and the forgotten, creeping toward me as if we’re playing a game of Red Light, Green Light, only instead of standing against a wall or a tree, I am teetering on the edge of a cliff, and if I turn my back for just one second too long, my own incompetence will slap me hard on the ass and send me barreling, face-first, into the precipice.

This past summer, the professor for my personal essay course had me draft a hypothetical statement of purpose highlighting my interest in a Creative Writing MFA. In it, I tried to capture my complex, semi-toxic relationship with my writing. Here is what I came up with: 

I like to imagine that my writing is a woman. She looks like me, but somehow different. Her eyes are powerful and observant and brimming with tears. She always has the expression of needing to scream. For several months, I grappled with the urge to assault my writing. I wanted to wring her neck, yank her hair, claw the soft skin of her cheeks. When I envisioned myself drawing her blood, I felt righteous and masculine, but I never felt triumphant, and I never put words on the page.

Sometimes I still feel like that villain, beating on my writing as if that will make her beautiful. But when I take a step back, when I climb down from the highwire between radical success and radical failure and have a good, long, ugly look at myself, I am able to identify the reason that I type only to delete. It's he reason that I edit just to re-edit and re-edit and re-edit again. The reason that I have never been able to blog.

And the reason, which is so obvious and yet so deceptively easy to miss, is this: I am afraid. 

I am afraid to disappoint the little girl version of me who does not choke on words, but sings them. The little girl who was born fluent in the language of magic and impossibilities. The little girl whose closest friends do not exist, and who spends hours upon hours plucking stories from midair. The little girl who has never, not even for a single doubtful second, wanted to be anything other than a writer. 

I am afraid that if I do not fulfill her dream, if I do not make her proud, then she will stop loving me, and that would be a harsher blow than anything I could possibly deliver to my writing.  

I need to rediscover my joy for writing. The same joy that has prevented me from quitting this violent, insufferable craft for the entirety of my life. The same joy that inspires me to write things like this, which heal wounds in indescribable places and bring tears to my eyes. And in order to do that, I need to write. Not desperately or masochistically, as I am so inclined to do, but gently and curatively. Forgivingly. 

All of that to say: I am going to start blogging. 

And it might be inconsistent, and it might be terrible, and a lot of my sentences might start with “and,” but at the very least, this blog will be. 

And for now, that will have to be enough.