This June, it will be ten years since I first started keeping an online journal.
I was going to say something like, “online journal, that’s what we called them before they were called weblogs,” but that’s not entirely true. Online journals were always much more about personal narrative, telling stories about your life. They’re by nature more inward-looking, while weblogs are by nature more outward-looking. I don’t know that I’ve ever been comfortable with the weblog model. Sure, I can (and do) point to interesting things other people have said, but that’s not a particularly satisfying mode of discourse.
When I started keeping an online journal, it was very personal. I had just graduated from college, both my personal and professional lives were in a state of vast inchoate flux, and there was something really rewarding about trying to turn it all into stories. I loved that style of personal narrative–taking the tiny everydayness of my tiny everyday life and turning it into something elegant and readable. I didn’t always have the best sense of personal boundaries or discretion–I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old, you know? It was, in many ways, a difficult time in my life, and I wrote about it with a kind of openness that in retrospect I find a little embarrassing.
When I started graduate school, I kept up with the online journal, although it started to take on a new purpose. Graduate school was such a strange new thing for me, and living in California, living on my own, getting involved with the science fiction world, making new friends and desperately missing my old friends, it was like I’d walked into someone else’s life entirely. I wrote about that too, tried to make sense of my life by telling it as a story. I think I also hoped that the journal would be a window into graduate school for people who weren’t there–not that my experiences were definitive in any way, but that they might be interesting.
The whole project started to fall apart about midway through grad school. There were a lot of reasons for that. I began to worry that talking so publicly about my life would make it difficult for me to get an academic job. I started to doubt that I actually had anything interesting to say. I had a frightening experience with a near-stranger who made me realized how exposed I’d made my life. I just got self-conscious about the whole thing, and then ambivalent, and then awkward.
I’m still self-conscious, and ambivalent, and awkward, but here I am, because I still think weblogs and webjournals are interesting, and I still want to be a part of this. It’s harder now than it used to be. At thirty-one, I’m much less comfortable telling the whole internet about my hopes and fears than I was at twenty-one. Not only that, but when I was a student, I could talk about what I did all day without necessarily being indiscreet. Today, the bulk of my time is taken up by teaching and by editing. I’ll talk about teaching, but I won’t talk about my students except in the most general terms, and I don’t feel comfortable talking about my editing clients, which means that a lot of my life is off-limits for the weblog.
And yet, and yet. And yet I like doing this, and I want to get back into the habit.
So that’s what we’re doing here. I’m going to try and put aside my ambivalence about this whole enterprise, and just embrace the aspects of it that I enjoy. I have this shiny new website to work with (courtesy of Jeremiah Tolbert, who I cannot recommend highly enough if you’re looking for a web designer). I’m going to try and unspool this huge queue of things I want to talk to y’all about.
Posted Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am. Filed under: academic > personal > writing and editing.
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Happy anniversary.
One of the most engaging aspects of trying to keep a blog, to me, is negotiating audience and privacy concerns alongside one’s own excitement. It’s a unique puzzle. I began writing on LiveJournal five years ago, since I’d been reading people there, and had immediate worries about posting about teaching: wanted a pressure valve and the benefit of others’ input, wanted not to cross too many lines.
When I moved to my own site, I decided not to import those entries or to institute something akin to friends-lock. (I’m still importing and processing old posts, very slowly.) Mostly, it’s because I’ve relaxed my iron grip on pseudonymity, but I think that having a non-teaching job has factored in—though I might still apply for a lectureship locally.
In short, I’m interested by superficial overlap in our respective experiences. :)
Yay Susan! Yay shiny new journal!