Every so often, I get emails about blogging-- usually either requests to advertise on my blog, or invitations to upload old or new content onto someone's shiny new writing website. These emails are inevitably confusing and distressing.
"Why the hell are you doing this?" I wonder. "I have no audience. I have no content. Do you not realize how obvious you're making it that your desperate little self is contacting everyone on the internet ever? This is stupid. You, sir, are stupid." Judging other people makes things so simple, doesn't it? In this case, it's a convenient way of not acknowledging the fact that I actually think it would be pretty cool if something I wrote was to matter to anyone who wasn't me or someone close to me. These things do happen, after all-- don't they? My sister decided she wanted to be a writer last year, and less than two months later, she had a paid weekly column for The Gloss (which you should definitely read, by the way, if you're not easily scandalized).
That kind of thinking is ridiculous and childish, though, and I tell myself so as often as I need to. I tell myself a lot of things. I've found it a very effective strategy for preventing sensible, caring individuals from getting through to me, especially when I'm dead set on destroying myself and that is absolutely fine, okay, I am fine and this is practical and I am just being realistic and I do not see how it is relevant that I have desires and fears and vulnerabilities and the rest of that nonsense so will you stop looking at me like that before my voice breaks and this whole thing goes to hell?
Things and people get lost. The important bits fall through the cracks while you are desperately trying to patch them and hating the whole damn, structurally-unsound edifice for falling apart in the first place. Life, at times, seems very, very long. And today, my reaction to getting an email--a followup, actually, to one I had already deleted without responding to--was to go and take down both of my blogs to make sure that no one else could get the incorrect impression that I'm still trying.
I sort of did. My older one is definitely gone, and I still say it was about time. But this one-- Well, here I am. New post =/= deletion by any stretch of the imagination, but here we are. I got here to Infinite Space and I remembered what its original purpose was-- how I was going to "get serious," put my writing in a place where other people could see it, develop good habits, get feedback, etc. etc. etc. Actually do what I have literally always said I want to do. I remembered why I picked the stupid title in the first place. I became painfully aware of how irrational of me it was to fall back into the hole because my resolution to get serious about writing had not "worked out," as if all this was dependent on some external force. I wondered how many times I will go through this cycle of determination --> fear --> inaction --> self-loathing/disgust --> despair before I stop taking the easy way out. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, when will I actually do something different instead of deciding that my (very common) form of insanity means that I am broken and that everything and everyone I touch is doomed? Stupid, self. Unproductive. Naive, cowardly, hypocritical, and arrogant. But then, those thoughts don't really help either, do they.
So I didn't delete the damn blog. I wrote this instead. Another reminder to myself (as if the list isn't long enough, but there's no point in going there) that I am not special--and that includes not especially bad, not especially ineffectual, not especially lost, and not especially broken. Things that are possible for other people--and god knows I spend enough time saying that they are--are possible for me, too. At least, they may very well be, and I will certainly never know if I don't stop shooting myself in the fucking foot.
Upekha. We're done here.
