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March 14, 2005
Oh wow, do I relate.
This Salon piece is worth viewing the SitePass ad for (even better that most of the SitePass ads these days on Salon are the ads for the new Cadillac - "This car is faster than this ad" is very effective when the ad is that quick, but I digress), and I can't say that I don't relate totally.
As debates rage about whether bloggers are journalists, whether they need shield laws to protect sources, whether they brought down Dan Rather and are going to take over the media world, on the other side of the blogosphere the diarists and memoirists and mothers are coping with a different set of ethical dilemmas: How much of themselves should they expose online, and how easily should they indulge their urge to confess? In my case, blogging about suicide might have crossed the line.
My blogging has been cathartic; my self-exposure served some kind of purpose, but there is no doubt that it exacted a cost. One of the problems was that there are a whole lot of people huddled under my particular dirty raincoat. There is my husband, a gracious and good-tempered man, and one who has himself wrestled with the self-exposure business. More important, because they are more defenseless, there are my children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from not quite 2 to 10 years old. I have always used my children as material in my fiction, and even occasionally in essays, but never with the immediacy demanded of a blog. My daughter shouted at her father, "You like being mean to us; you're nothing but a hatred machine." Half an hour later, it was in print online. The children are not allowed to read my blog -- they are still young enough that I can monitor their computer use with relative ease. Frankly, at this stage they are far more interested in Gaia online and Muffin Films Web sites, but there will surely come a day when they will Google themselves, find my blog and both be furious with me for having stolen their lives and humiliated at the extent to which I have laid open my own. I told the New York Times reporter that blogging was "payback for driving back and forth to gymnastics all week long," but I don't really believe that. As much as I despise carpool, I wasn't trying to exact some kind of complicated revenge for having been forced to spend too many hours in a minivan.
Of course, I'm a dad, not a mom, but there are elements here of my own dilemma that are similar. There is the overwhelming desire (even and especially as I lapse into the moments of egomaniacally thinking that what I write here might somehow Change The World For The Better) to lay open every corner of my life. Thankfully, that will almost certainly never involve the temptation towards suicide (my worldview is built around the inherent value of life for its own sake, and besides I'm absolutely scared to death of death itself) but how many other things could I write about and trigger an outpouring of response with that would be nothing more sophisticated than yanking the emotional chains? To something like that would be irresponsible.
I'm hitting a point in life where I feel like I need to write, and deal with the tensions in my life directly and specifically - but at the same time, I don't want to cross these lines and make my loved ones (or, for that matter, my students or my employers) feel like I'm cheaply getting something to write about off of their backs. How do I resolve this?
Posted by Chuck at March 14, 2005 02:59 PM
Comments
go to a mom-and-pop store. pick up a black and white flecked composition notebook. go home. write your little heart out. seriously, it works. i did it with my luke "trauma" at the beginning of this year, and even though no one but me (and luke, since he asked to see it and i trust him too much) read it, it still felt good to get it all out there.
and if necessary, burn the thing once you fill it up. just be careful that it's somewhere with open space...don't want you dying from any toxic pen fumes.
Posted by: Rachel at March 14, 2005 10:30 PM
Man, can I ever relate. It's funny -- I have a post about the very same article in my editor, waiting to be polished up. It's a hard process learning where those personal boundaries are, what things should be protected, be sheltered from that kind of exposure. It's a complicated deal.
Posted by: Jeff at March 15, 2005 09:10 AM
Well, hurry up and post the dang thing, boy. I need more takes rather than just my own confused ones.
Posted by: Dr Chuck at March 15, 2005 09:33 AM
i think rachel's notebook is the only way she got through Lagow's class last semester...and some things just aren't meant for everyone else to read, but will eat at you until you get it out somehow even if no one else ever reads it (look rachel, another dash...this is getting out of hand lol)
Posted by: Celestia at March 16, 2005 10:00 PM