the self-indulgences, the exposure and the perils of the blog

This is Emily Gould's cover article for this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

I read it today as I find myself coming to what feels like a critical juncture in my own blogging life. In this article, she relates the soul-taxing story of her blogging career, from modest, personal web presence to contributor to the snipe-apallooza, Gawker and back down to personal blogger again. I note her tale as a cautionary one.

Even at its smallest, Gould's audience was significantly more substantial than my own. I popped over to the blogs she mentions in the article and, basically, I'm not all that interested in most of the stuff she discusses. But I can see how plenty of folks would be. She speaks of having a couple hundred visitors every day. On a really good day, I get about 125 page loads (mind you, that's not individual visitors-- most people who've never been to my blog before poke around a little and generate, maybe, 3 page loads each.) So, I have roughly 15 readers who check daily... and maybe 35 or 40 who check once or twice a week. A couple hundred readers sounds like a writhing mass to me, though, in comparison to the hits she got on Gawker, it's no doubt that a few hundred is, indeed, modest.

Even on my much smaller scale, I find myself struggling with the line between what's merely interesting and what's oversharing-- just as she describes. I scare myself that somehow, because I'm insisting upon making these thoughts publicly accessible, someone, someday, is going to find them and it's going to cause trouble for me. I try pretty hard to respect the privacy of friends, lovers, acquaintances, colleagues and I will never ever mention my actual place of employment here. But still, a blog is a beacon, for better or worse. And I want to take responsibility for that. If I'm going to hold forth with negative opinions, I try to limit my snarkier critical comments to my discussions people's work and philosophies. I don't want to insult anyone's actual personhood. I don't call people ugly (with the notable exception of Justice Scalia, who I did, I believe, call "fat"). I try pretty hard to not say anything mean about the private life of any given public personage. I try really, really hard to only gossip about myself and to shield the actual people in my life from this forum. That's not the sort of karmic detritus I want to unleash upon the world, or myself. But I am developing an oversharing problem, not unlike Gould's.

As my posts stray further and further into my little trove of personal anecdotes, I find that I'm developing a blog persona that both is and is not me. When I was in grad school, I remember a poet in one of my workshops reading a poem that contained a line about how he liked to strut around his apartment with a huge erection. When he finished reading the poem, he shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. He said something like, "Oh, boy. This is another one of those poems for which I'm going to have to explain to my mom that the 'me' in the poem isn't really me." There is this Poetry Code: never assume that the speaker of any given poem and the poet who wrote it are the same person. But a lot of people forget the code or never learn it in the first place. Hence, I have to explain:

Blog-writing isn't too different. I DO think the things I write here. This stuff occurs in my head, yes, absolutely. I stand by these thoughts-- but still, based on some of the feedback I get when new readers find me here, I think I might be coming off as... I don't know... ballsier? than I really am. This girl who writes this blog is brazen and unafraid and spouts off opinions-- opinions that, more often than not, she's really just trying on for size. And me? I sit in my apartment, alone on a Thursday night, and fret that people who I might want to love me or employ me or respect me or socialize with me will not be able to see past the sexpot blogger to find the socially awkward neurotic standing (in sexy shoes) behind her. Of course, calling myself an awkward neurotic probably isn't accurate either -- I'm probably somewhere in between. Who isn't?

Of course, I also worry that people with whom I would never consider engaging on a sexual level will assume that my liberated espousals here grant them permission to solicit my attentions in real life. This is the problem that generated my last post, I guess. Sometimes I think I totally have that kind of attention coming. And other times, I find it a total nuisance that I actually have to explain that I'm more than the sum total of my blog posts.

The thing about writing, though, is that the more of it you do, the more it defines you. You really do become your texts. You put all this stuff out into the world with your name on it and somehow, the frayed and unraveling edges between you and your work somehow braid up together. And when you contradict yourself, or change your mind -- or say one thing, and then its opposite -- when you're just trying to figure things out, you open yourself up to being called a hypocrite. You're not supposed to be able to hold two opposing views simultaneously... but your writing might... and real, fleshly humans do. All the time. There is a challenge, I think, when you are writing your own stories to insist that, while these things come out of you, they are not you. You are a person. You are not a writerly figment. It is also a challenge for us readers to accept the paradoxical nature of the relationship between textual output and its producers, no?

A blog renders its writer in 2 dimensions, in frequently updated black and white. And mine renders me a hypersexual know-it-all with a bunch of half-assed theories. It's an absolutely dead-on accurate rendering, too. Except that some days, it's also dead wrong.

More and more of my life has been creeping into this blog that was designed to be an outlet for my film and social criticisms. My post listing contains a handful of half-written entries that got close enough to the reveal-me fire for me to feel the heat. I haven't yet finished them because I got scared. I actually went so far as to open up another blog-- one that would be anonymous and utterly NC-17. It's got a sexy title and a tightly cropped, very self-flattering photo of my tits as its header bar. It's still up, but you'll never find it. It's got nothing on it, so it's virtually unsearchable. I put up one very personal post (an edited version of an email I was too chickenshit to send) and freaked out about two things: a) what if someone actually read it and traced it back to me? and b) what if no one ever read it and it never got an audience? I took the post down after a couple hours. And here, I thought I was so brave.

When Gould talks about the addictive quality of audience attention, she's not kidding. I ache to be read. I've spoken about the exhibitionism of blogging before. For me, the point of writing at all is so that someone will read it. I could still write all the stuff that I write here if I didn't have a blog. But I lose the motivation to do so if I feel like no one's ever going to see it. Ultimately, I don't know if I took that post down from my hidden blog because it just went too far or because I couldn't bear the thought of checking its statcounter day in and day out just to see if someone was going to find it and read it -- and being disappointed that no one had.

So, I don't know what I'm doing here. Gould's article scared me, as I see how easy it would be to wind up as demoralized as she is. I'm petrified that all this is going to bite me on the ass-- that I'm going to say something too intimate about a person I love and he or she is going to hate me for it. I'm petrified that the brass at my new job is going to find me, like they did at my old job. (By the way, I think, but do not know for sure, that they are still reading. Come for the espionage, stay for the smut!) but I've got some stuff through which I'm thinking-- about the ways my life reflects the cultural moment -- and I want you guys to read it and respond to me.

So I'm going to push through and see if there's anything on the other side of that rainbow.

I suppose I can only request understanding that the brown rabbits haven't been given access to the complete story of me. I'm far more self-contradictory than any blog could ever convey. I'm under the assumption that you are, too. I'll grant you that leeway, so long as your grant it me in return.