Digital Demolition

I stopped writing in 1990.

Before 1990, I was always writing. Letters that friends would never see. Really bad poems that only an adolescent mind would commit to paper. Documenting hanging in the coop yard with the chickens. Notes to pass in class. Later journaling college angst and romantic musing. Lots of questions, few answers. More wondering ifs and whats. Stories about the monsters who hang in your peripheral after staying awake too long. Becoming friends with the monsters by turning them into cartoon characters who had shifts. Just doin’ their job.

In 1990, I was at a party. Suddenly, Potential New Boyfriend (B) warns me that Probable Ex-Boyfriend (E) had showed up at the door. I scampered to the closet with several beers and my best friend (Y). We giggled. We drank. We waited until E would leave. B came to the closet with two bits of news. The first was that E had left the party. The second, B gravely delivered, was that E had broken into my car, taken my journal, copied several pages, and distributed those pages at the party. B pointed out that the pages intended to incriminate me actually revealed that I had feelings for him and he was delighted. It’s been nearly 20 years and I can’t remember what the other pages had said.

Instead of staggering after the Probable Ex, we finished our party and I slept over at B’s place. When I awoke in the morning, I collected Y from the nearby bedroom and we went on a rampage to recover the lost journal. We started wtih the guy who had helped copy the journal. He lived with B, so it was a quick jaunt across the hall to terrorize him. We ransacked his room. Demanded details. At the time, Y and I could be quite a force. This guy revealed that E had the journal, so we hopped in my car (now with a broken back side window) and went to E’s apartment. We burst in and demanded the journal back. He was sitting on his bed in the tiny studio and at one point he started to get up and Y drew back her arm to punch him. He sat back down. He pleaded with me to talk with him about us. He defended his actions because he needed to know what I was thinking. I maintained my “give me my fucking journal back right now” stance. Eventually he removed the journal from under his mattress and handed it over. I demanded the copies. He said he’d passed them all away at the party. Without another word, Y and I turned and left.

I didn’t write for a few years. I moved to San Francisco in 1992, and in 1994, Crystal, a pre-op MTF I met while playing pool, told me that I should pick a different kind of book and begin journaling again. (I was really fond of the particular style of notebook I used to use and my Crystal thought that the reminder of the incident was based on the actual appearance of the notebook.) So I bought a fancy red journal. Wrote a simple paragraph daily for nearly a week. Put the book away and didn’t write anything personal for another several years. I was snake-bitten. Worried that if the current BF (B from 1990) read the book, he’d misunderstand. Despite his assurances that he would never read it, I just couldn’t start.

In May 2003, my friends were all abuzz with this new LiveJournal thing. Used it to chronicle the absurdities of life in the city, to share pictures, and to send party invitations. I asked my friend to send me an invitation (at the time you needed one to get an account). I started using the LJ to share my little snippets of experiences and thoughts. Learned the importance of filtering my words to avoid misunderstandings. Learned not to post when drunk. Learned how to journal again without actually saying anything too personal. I was writing, but at one-tenth the honesty as before 1990. And people thought I was brash, despite my conscious holding back. Yeesh – if they thought I was bad now, what if they knew what I was actually thinking?

I started sharing pretty freely. Documented my breakup with 13-year-long relationship with B. Made friends and filtered enemies. It wasn’t the great american novel, but at least I was writing. In 2007, I had a stroke, and was warned by a friend with government experience to lock everything down. Apparently if you post pictures of yourself scuba diving in Aruba, the gov’t could use that to deny claims. I culled my accounts, dumped my various online journals (I did lots of cross-posting) and was quiet once more. Post-stroke, I became a much nicer person. I no longer had energy for all the anger that once sustained me. I started meditating. I distanced myself from former friends who couldn’t see the nicer me – they’d (probably a little jokingly but still painfully) tease me about having gone soft. Once again I feared the tedious conversations that would come from misunderstandings.

My head is a very busy place. Always has been. Journaling used to be my therapy – to get my brain to STFU. For years I languished, with half-remembered stories crowding an already busy station. When I got a laptop, I started a bunch of stories that never saw anyone. That never got finished. When I’d get a new computer, I’d sometimes move the stories and sometimes leave them behind. In 2008, I’d started reading several inspiring blogs while I recuperated from the stroke. I started thinking again about starting a blog for public consumption. I got a couple of new domains and had Wordpress installed (one for personal and one for work).

Gah. I felt sick. It felt like I was suddenly staring at an enormous white sheet of paper and everyone in my life and on the internet was staring at it waiting for something to happen. That’s lasted for several months. I started more stories that lack endings, more memories dredged from the depths of my time away from writing. And I’ve been waiting for the right post to present itself. I don’t know that that will ever happen.

So, I’m starting here. With the simple story of why I stopped writing. And this time I’m hitting publish because of this lovely post. Scared to death, but I’m doing it anyway. Spell check and then done. Forgive the grammar and typos.

Perhaps someday I can hit publish on a post that lacks disclaimers and qualifiers. Today is not that day. But it’s a start. (Great – now I’m humming that “put one foot in front of the other” song. Yes, my internal DJ is a bitch.)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.