JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

David Weinberger appreciates the insight and wisdom Lisa Williams shares and so do I. In recent weeks, I’ve felt disillusioned with blogging, frustrated by its limitations and awkwardness, by my inability to be who I am on my blog. I have felt I am being inauthentic, false, living a dual life. However, especially after the times we have shared together in person as well as our email and weblog dialogues, I knew someone might be able to help me so I sent out a message in a bottle towards Boston.

As an example of making what is private public, I am posting emails Lisa and I exchanged on the 18th and 19th of January, at Lisa’s suggestion. In the blur of the past month I did not get to publishing this conversation as soon as I would have liked to have done. I am posting it now to reveal part of the process behind the creation of the talk I am giving this weekend at Northern Voice on Making Masks, the ways we relate through weblogs. Also because Lisa shared some excellent quotes that I’d like to have available on public record.

Thanks to Lisa for her grace and experience, for her encouragement and care: yes, I’m still blogging…

My email:

Thanks for your note and posts. I’ve been experiencing disillusionment with blogging, to the point of thinking of quitting. There’s talk of transparency and being ourselves in a blog, but at the same time, as I examine principles and bloggers, I see people getting fired and hurt in other ways. It feels limiting. I feel frustrated that I can’t share certain areas of my life and I feel I am not being authentic, transparent or myself. There are some secrets in my life that could benefit from public exposure. Maybe I could encourage others or others could encourage me. Then again the price might be too much to pay. Hard to know.

Thanks for all you’ve added this week your insight into the dialogue on privacy, disclosure and policies.I am inspired and may write more soon…

take care,
Julie

Lisa’s reply:

I feel like encouraging you to keep blogging, but it feels like a dodge. Let’s face the issue head on: Blogging sucks. It offers yet another field for people who have power to oppress those who don’t, another avenue of the suffocating, total enforcement of social norms everywhere and at all times.

Looking at that, I’m not sure that blogging sucks, but it’s true that blogging exposes a lot that sucks about the real world — notably the power of society to enforce norms, and enforce them unequally depending on your status in society. The boss’s blog is run by different rules than the guy who works in the mail room. Similarly, a blog pitilessly exposes all the stuff we just have to shut up about, and shows us once and for all that we are not free, not here and not on our blog. It’s not blogging so much that we are not free in. It’s real life. (this is in part why I support the phenomenon of anonymous blogging. If the penalties for truth-telling differ so radically between the bossman and the nobody, why should the nobody be required to drag the same broken system operating in the real world — the manifestly unfair one — into the new world of their weblog?)

At best, blogs can be a sort of prison testament. I’m trapped here in this life. In this body. In this society, in this family, in this job, in this system where if I tell the real truth, I suffer. Writing policies to a certain extent is a way of saying Uncle to the Man.

Ultimately the act of breaking the seal on a secret has nothing to do with blogging, although blogging dramatizes it, makes it bigger, louder, and with more explosions.

I certainly feel there are things I’m not sure I want to say on my weblog. These are things that fit within my own policy — I’m not sharing something that belongs to someone else. For instance, I often feel like staying home with kids is like living in a veal pen. Of course, I felt that way about my job and school too. Do I really want to say that on my blog? It’s the truth. [Upon reflection, probably a lot of parents of toddlers feel cooped up in the house a lot. One thing blogging does is make you realize that a lot of the things you think inside your head that you think are awful are, in the end, pretty common…because somebody’s already blogged them.]

It occurs to me that guys don’t have this problem, Jerry aside. Is that true? Nah, probably not. It just seems like Instapundit doesn’t have this problem. Probably all bloggers are faced with the “Should I post this?” problem at one point or another.

I may end up saying that. But at the moment, the existing limitations I’ve placed on my weblog don’t feel like limitations to me — they feel like tools. I think of them as the rules for writing a sonnet or a sestina. They give some shape to my writing, and they force me not to be lazy. Often the first attempt at a line doesn’t fit in the form, it doesn’t work. I have to try harder. The end result, I like it. And by doing it, I’m also working out my own issues with limitations in real life, the real limitations I have to live with, and I’m making art out of them. There are lots of limitations in my life that just aren’t going anywhere. I can’t change them. I may as well make use of them.

The one thing I would say, is that you’ve done about three decades of therapy on your blog in the last year. Blogging can be pretty intense as a method of self-understanding and self-transformation. It also sounds to me like your island needs some serious help. I think of my blog as a playground swing, it swings in, it swings out. Focusing outward isn’t just a dodge, it gives me the tools to figure out what to do with what’s going on inside, some way to manifest that inner world on the outer world.

I think it would be cool if you went out every day and took a picture of the parkinglot of your local supermarket. Or a picture of every flagpole. Or every mailbox on the island, and reflections on the local area, its problems and its nice stuff.

Seriously. The outside world is where it’s at. I think the answer is out there.
Feel free to blog this mail. 🙂

PS. We started recording audio of our weekly Thursday meetings. Last thursday’s contained a bunch of talk about related issues. And laughing.