JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

As I am preparing for my talk on Making Masks: Blogging as Social Tool and Family Lifestyle at Northern Voice this weekend, I am also considering how to post pieces of my presentation.

For the past two months I have made bookmarks in my del.icio.us page, posting links that were related to the topics I planned to discuss.

I had been using the tag “northernvoice” but I realized that my use of the tag may not correlate to others and may cause confusion.

So I’ve created my own tags for my talk, one tag for notes/bibliography/pieces that influenced my thinking (northernvoicejltalknotes) and another for posts I plan to explicitly mention in my talk (northernvoicejltalk).

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.

Yesterday as I was walking in the morning, a robin flew over me. For an instant I glimpsed red, the rest of the bird’s body pulled together tight in a smooth aerodynamic shape. It was as if the robin was in slow motion or if my eyes had become a camera with a slick shutter speed. It was a moment I would have missed if I had been running. This morning I caught tiny gray birds bouncing on branches near the ground. Some were clearly chickadees but the smaller ones I couldn’t identify. I stood for a while and watched, enchanted, wanting to run into the woods and join them but knowing my action, even my running, would scare them away.

We have spring and we have winter. Some mornings I wake to see frost thick on the roofs and streets, white like snow. Then the days unfold with warm sunshine, bright; the girls don’t want to wear coats outside although the thermometer warns us it is still winter. Yellow, purple and white, the crocuses are arriving, glowing like stained glass flowers. In the soil we can see where daffodils and tulips will be blooming soon, their green leaves like trumpets announcing the anticipation. Before lunch, the girls and I skip down the street to pet the pussy willow bush and feel the soft gray beneath our fingers.

One morning this week I woke and wondered where I had been. It felt as if I had been a bear, hibernating in a hole, and now could see sunshine. The winter inside me had been cold. Now I know what spring can mean…

See Spring!

Yes, it’s evident that I have been distracted this week. But I have been thinking about blogging: I’ve spent my post-writing time working on my talk for the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, B.C. tomorrow (exactly 24 hours from the time I am typing – but who’s counting?!) What do I plan to discuss? Making masks or, in other words, the ways that we appear in pieces on our weblogs, the ways we are or are not present in our posts…and no, I’m not ever all here…

Writing my talk was an intense and creative process. Earlier this month I enoyed Dave Pollard’s post on sources of great ideas, discovering it first through seeing his intriguing charts appearing in Dave Winer’s Pictures from the top 100 feed. I haven’t taken the survey titled Where and When Do You Get Your Best ideas? but I have been thinking about what helps me be creative. I soon discovered that sitting down at my desk at 10 pm and telling myself I had to put a talk together then and there didn’t work. Part of the process involves being in a “mood” or is it “mode”: I can’t think of a better way to describe it, but I know I can’t force creativity. I think my best ideas come to me when I am walking around the block in the morning or while I am living life: doing domestic duties, washing dishes, folding laundry, driving the car, watching the girls at the playground. Years ago I heard someone I respect say that songwriting meant scribbling notes wherever creativity came, and I have notepads upstairs and downstairs to catch the ideas that fly through my mind. On Wednesday I listened to a Hallmark clerk try to sell me a chickadee ornament just so I could take the advertising card and (with the store pen) jot two notes to myself of thoughts I didn’t want to forget while I was out shopping with my daughters. For the past week I’ve been immersed in preparing this talk, ignoring or postponing as much as possible other items requiring my attention, my mind meditating on the words and pictures I have chosen (apologies to anyone). I haven’t been working on pieces of fiction or research in years but working on my presentation has been as if I were writing short stories on a deadline again. Once I formed the basic outline, it began to feel a little like clay, in 3-D, molding and shaping with a spin of the wheel and touch of the fingers. It’s also been a little like acting, getting comfortable with the words and images, preparing to share a story from the stage. It’s been fun.

Here are a few related posts that caught my attention:

Sunday morning I read Robert Scoble’s link to Andrew Connell’s moblog celebrating the birth of his son. As Robert wrote: what’s a more important story than the birth of a new baby? Beautiful pictures.

Next I read Amanda Witt’s link to Mariane Pearl’s piece in The Sunday Times describing life after the loss of her dad in childhood and the loss of her husband, Daniel Pearl, while pregnant: I fight my husband’s killers with laughter.

Earlier last week Susan Mernit highlighted Caterina Fake’s Trials and Tribulations.

The thing I’ve noticed is that people who have suffered and survived terrible things are stronger than the rest of us, and they almost invariably become existentialists, and obsess about their own responsibility for making the meaning in their lives.

Like Caterina, I like to read Viktor Frankl and others who have survived horrors, such as Eli Wiesel. When I was younger, I found comfort reading about other people’s pain and perseverance. In college I wanted to minor in Holocaust literature. I felt my own childhood had been a difficult time and my desire to survive it was strengthened by reading other’s stories of survival. As Caterina described, although I don’t know if I was strong, I did become an existentialist for a while, embracing Camus, expressing my angst through stories where the characters “always got rained on”, according to one teacher.

Now that I’m older, I don’t seek out stories of suffering although I have read many. The more I’ve become connected to other people, through connections and friendships, books or blogging, the more I’ve realized that my pain can’t compare to other people’s grief. My life was a cake walk. It had many blessings even though I didn’t believe it at the time. I can see in new ways and find gold amidst the garbage.

I like to think that through time and healing, through the physical changes of motherhood and the faith I’ve fed in my heart, I’ve become less concerned about myself, less focussed on my own ache, and more compassionate towards others. When I read what Mariane Pearl has endured, as a daughter, wife and mother, I can only imagine and pray.

I know that by killing my husband the terrorists expected to break my life and that of my son. But I am fighting the holiest of fights and I win. Giving birth is my ultimate act of anti-terrorism. I am perpetuating Danny. This is what I tell Danny as our son, Adam, finds his way out to the world.

I know there is only one answer to those who killed Danny: life. I write my beliefs down for myself:

They want to silence me; therefore I will speak out.
They want to kill joy in me; therefore I will laugh.
They want to paralyse me; therefore I will take action.
They want war; therefore I will fight for peace.

Some day I will pass these words on to my son.