The irony of me posting this as a blogpost is not lost on me. But watching something this morning has made me think again about something that’s been swarming in the back of my head for a while now.
I don’t want to join the choir of hypocrites and say “Yes, she’s right” and then continue to painstakingly post the minutiae of my life online. I’ve been realising for a while, through an internal process, that, really, I need to curb it. It’s just so easy though and, even though there are now clearly delineated parts of my life I won’t share anymore, I still find myself shoving the innermost thoughts I have into some sort of 140 character rubbish I probably shouldn’t post anyway.
The thing is, for me, and I don’t know what it’s like for you, so I won’t assume or presume anything… is that, right now, life online makes me tired. I feel powerless to it, and I feel like I’m consumed by it, often. I don’t feel the need for affirmation that others may feel, as Essena outlined in her video, but I do feel a need to stay connected, and realising that said a lot more to me than I thought it would.
About halfway through this year, I committed to not logging on during certain weekends. I did this because I noticed that, the moment I sit down every day, I open three familiar tabs. And then, for the first few minutes of my day, I read. I catch up. I “connect”. Except, I don’t. Instead, I get sucked in to some maelstrom of other stuff I don’t really care about, and then I feel compelled to say something. Be intelligent. Or funny. Whatever. I’ve found myself wanting to not be here, but the truth is – I have to be. This is what I do, where I live and how I work. Hell, I make a living out of being online, although my career is not defined by my online persona. I can, however, thank my online life for my career. Does this make sense? It shouldn’t – I feel like I’m experiencing a contradiction in thought, just by writing it.
This is how I find new work, keep in touch with people I care about (and I do, actually, care about the people who live inside my screen) and figure out my life moving forward. But as I’ve slowly curbed the stuff I share online (there are some areas of my world I will never, ever share…right now being one of them, because we have stuff going on, but it will be fine), I’ve become more territorial about the things I do say or share online. And as I’ve taken more and more elements of myself offline, and mentally marked things that I will not let anyone in on, I feel like I’m reclaiming pieces of myself. Pieces that I gave away, freely. And a lot of the pieces of me I gave away, started from a place of personal pain.
The thing about pain is, there is a relief to sharing it. When I talk about something horrible that has been experienced by me, it always ends up two ways – one, where people roll their eyes and click “next” or the other, very sweet, “we’re here for you” approach. The thing that I have always found to be healing, is in sharing that pain. Heck, it’s how and why I began writing in the first place. But as I started leaving things out of my life online, I also stopped talking about the inner turmoil that I feel on many days. I started sharing less of what I really felt like, and honestly, right now, I feel like a complete failure at a bunch of stuff I am scared to confess to.
But I am also happy, so please don’t think the two can’t co-exist. In my real life – the one where I bake for my dog and oversee my kid’s homework or, you know, watch a movie with my boyfriend – I am exceedingly joyful. I have everything I could possibly have desired in my real life, and that includes the sometimes melancholy parts of me. It’s in that part of me, that I have always, and probably will always, find a muse. It is in the quiet self-confrontations that I am able to discover and pinpoint the things I want to say but can’t find the words in the jumble of a day.
I made a pact with myself that, this year, I would say goodbye to a lot of my pain. No, that I would bid farewell to sharing a lot of my pain publicly but that, in itself, is very much a farewell to it. I have my reasons for it, all of which are tied up in a bundle of wanting-to-acknowledge-a-journey-I’ve-been-on. And while I may still share a fear or two (I have many, constantly, every day), I also needed to focus on the fact that I have come a really long way. Longer than I expected, better than I thought. Not as good as the world often desires me to be, but I like this place. I like this place for me.
I am not the girl who would sit in front of her computer with a cigarette burning her hair, crying into her keyboard at 2am. Anymore. There were a million beginnings in that girl, but a thousand more endings that got her there. My inner pain… it had become a crutch for me. An excuse, even, to prevent me from moving forward in my own life.
In actively working to bid my personal pain adieu, I realised it was me who kept putting me through it, over and over again. That’s the thing though – life happens and pain occurs because of an experience. I’m not saying I’m immune to it now, but I am saying that I’ve learnt I can have some element of control over how I choose to express it. Realising that I choose, and not the circumstances I find myself in, was a revelation in its own right.
And that’s why I don’t blog as much anymore. That’s why I’m trying very hard to log off when I need to. And that’s why I’m not going to tell you about some things. And mostly, I’m never going to do it to get some likes.