Sex & Journalism

 The struggle continues.  While I desperately need to report my experiences and document my thoughts, I also desperately need privacy.  It is the duality of my disposition and the polarity of my plight that drive me to a high-speed collision with my conscience nearly every day.  Once again, I have been confronted with someone who has revealed me to myself, and due to it (and Google image search), I have lost an opportunity and a friend.  It is this sort of thing that causes me to live in constant anxiety.  Who will discover me here?  I worry about how they will interpret my pieces and what negative effects this could have.  I have already had issues with my presence here by friends who have brought their discovery to my attention.  And I have the overwhelming feeling that there are people who have not said anything about having found me here, but who have, and silently watch and read and become alienated by my words, not realizing that these are just fragments of the bigger picture, while they sadly slip away from me because of their discreet investigation.  But as I worry about what kind of risk I’m taking by putting my thinly veiled presence online, I also worry about what I would be doing to myself by not having a presence at all.  I have always been a writer.  I don’t know how not to write.  I have also always been a collector of stories.  Having a rich collection of colorful life experiences to think about, talk about and cherish as the very things that construct the fabric of my being, fuel me.  It is my desire, my compulsion - sometimes I feel my spiritual duty - to explore, to take chances, to share and to be heard.  If I stopped writing for the sake of privacy, I would not be stressed about who may see what and how they may interpret it.  But to stop writing for the sake of protection would be to clinch the figurative wet fingers on my brightly burning flame.  How do I find balance between opposing needs, and is there even such a thing when blogging?  When does honesty begin to do us more harm than good?  Does too much liberation restrict us?  As a certain shrewish Shakespearean character said,

“I want to be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.”

But at what point does practicing our uttermost verbal freedom actually entrap us?  Is it out reticence or our rebellion that ultimately grants us a greater voice?

Raquel

 If you are a writer of an anonymous blog, one of the dangers of only providing a very slight veil to your own identity is that you will eventually become discovered by someone you know.  Recently, someone very close to me stumbled across my blog.  He had no idea about my life, so it was a pretty intense moment when I received the text saying “I found your blog.”  We’ve been discussing it on and off since then, and one of the things I’ve found myself needing to explain is that while my diary entries are, in fact, thoughts and experiences that I have actually had, they are not necessarily written in real time and not in their truth entirely.  I must be careful what I say and how I say it.  I am frequently flexible with certain facts and often use artistic license in the interest of:

1) Good story telling

2) Giving much more effort to protect those I’m writing about than I give to protect myself

Last night, (I am, in a rare instance, telling this story as it happens) I grabbed one of many books of the shelf of the woman whose flat I’m subleasing.  She and I have similar interest and I was immediately drawn to a book called “The Wit and Wisdom of Great Writers”,  a small black and white book compiled solely of quotes from known authors.  The following quotes remind me of the conversations that have followed the inquisitions of my dear,  confused friend who is still trying to adjust to this newfound knowledge of my secret life,  and trying to understand if he should believe everything I write.  To him, I offer this:

‘Then you should say what you mean,’  the March Hare went on.  ‘I do,’  Alice hastily replied;  ‘at least – at least I mean what I say - that’s the same thing, you know.’  ‘Not the same thing a bit!’  said the Hatter.  ‘Why, you might just as well say that I see what I eat is the same thing as I eat what I see!’

“She understood,  as women do more easily than men,  that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat,  and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons."

On that note,  I leave you with a fitting aesthetic gift for your visual pleasure.

* Quotes from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland ad Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda.

~Raqs