workday
I try very hard not to leave the house. I think I had been tending in that direction for many years. Even when the grown children were babies, I preferred to be the one with them at home over the one making public appearances at swim practice or ta kwan do or soccer or gymnastics or fundraiser spaghetti dinner or the movies or the ice skating stuffed animal extravaganza. I liked my parenting to take place in a less public manner. But I like everything I do to take place in a less public manner. Almost.
If it were really true that I wanted to be completely unnoticed, I wouldn't do things like write about my dead friends and whatnot and then publish that writing. I wouldn't have appeared in multiple documentaries talking about barbie dolls and belly buttons and the like. I wouldn't have art shows. I wouldn't be blogging. I'd be scribbling on little bits of paper and hiding them so that after my death someone might find them. Although that is also not private and in the sneakiest way possible. The fact remains that the remains of the writing would exist. Someone might read them. While one might claim that they are writing to future selves or some such, it's still not private. Yet, I think there is something about that potential audience even if it's an unlikely one that makes you finish your sentences. Something about the pen traveling across the page or the text appear on the screen that forces some accountability. Because there might be a reader? In my head I am always writing graceful sentences that are both trenchent and poetic. Yet, the moment I am at the page the sentences become recalcitrant and crampled. Grammar which had such a light hold on the reins in my brain exerts far more control even if I seek to defy it. The nuns of my youth were hard taskmasters and the professors of my adulthood just as much. I was trained to think that writing should be understandable and should be interesting.
Perhaps the blog is my attempt to be understandable but I don't want to spread it all around because I might not be interesting. I'd hate not to be interesting since I've staked a good deal of my self worth on being interesting and suffered a great deal collecting interesting experiences to ensure that I remain interesting. Yet the pressure to entertain has probably had an ill effect on my therapy and perhaps other relationships where it is beside the point and perhaps even undermining to the point. Nevertheless I think most of my therapists have liked me.
Which takes me back to the point. Being public being private. Therapy. Writing. Not leaving the house. The desire for attention the desire for invisibility. I'm tempted to throw my hands up in the air and proclaim it all impossible and ridiculous. Writing for no one makes as much sense as writing for someone. I'm going to do it though because the imaginary someone keeps me wanting to shape my thoughts into legibility and when I do that I am forced to look at my thoughts. And looking at my thoughts leads me to think better. And thinking better gives me pleasure.
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