Publicly, I mean. I know, I’ve been offline for awhile. I posted some all-revealing piece about the intersections between my love life (death) and life-journeying/real-journeying aspirations, then abandoned the interwebs like a biawak fleeing a homo sapien (this actually happens, regularly, in my neighborhood—some people have sewage rats, we have sewage dinosaurs). (No, seriously. See photo below.) Not because I don’t love my folks or want people to know what’s going on in my crazy, adventure-filled, happy-making, lesson-learning, indescribably beautiful, challenging, growth-inducing life abroad (it has been, by the way, all of those things and more), but because I finally let myself clasp onto a question that has floated beneath the surface of my writing endeavors for years. It’s a question I’ve faced full-frontal a few times, but the rawness it requires has caused me to turn away, again and again, bashful. I don’t know, perhaps the concentrated confidence it requires—the ability to sit diligently beneath a fluorescent light and withstand methodical dissection—perhaps that confidence has itself required a space and slowness of time that I just haven’t been able to give. It requires not taking yourself too seriously but, actually, yeah, taking yourself seriously.
In any case, it requires a presence of mind that I haven’t given it, and it requires this presence because it is not an easy question—the question being, of course, perennially—“Why do we write?”
Really, this question can be asked countless ways. Why do we sing? Why do we dedicate ourselves to a career? Why do we have children? Why do we make friends? Why do we seek love? Why do we live?
Woah, woah there. Existential crossing ahead.
Really, though, that’s what it boils down to for me. “Why do we write?” is simply another way to ask why we live the way we do, why we produce, why we move. Writing for pleasure, journaling, creating lists, whatever you want to classify as “personal” is easier. Writing for the self can be therapeutic, can be therapeutic, can be therapeutic. It can provide records for future selves. It can help organize our daily lives. It can simply serve as a psychological release.
But is that all? Those descriptions work for both personal writing and the public. What is it, though, that connects those two? Why do we ever make the personal public? We have bloggers who write like the internet is their journal. Others blog like the internet is a daily hours log that they keep for employers or auditors. Then we have literary folk who make the distinction more concrete, some of whom write public works that look like mere echoes of their private diaries, if there is any resemblance at all. Why? Why does anyone do this? Why does anyone put ANY part of their writing into a public space, for eyes, many probably unknown, to, in an uncontrolled environment, interact with the text? To pull it apart and judge, or to scan it and dismiss, or to skim it and smile, or to dig deep and reconfigure, or to wander word to word and repurpose syllable by syllable, or to copy and paste (in the digital age, it’s difficult to imagine writers, especially newcomers to the game and those lesser known, not worrying about plagiarism—unless you are a fabulously accomplished Buddhist or are otherwise so skilled at the art of letting go that you can even let go of your art in this way—in which case, congrats and also thanks for reading this long tangent, you patient Buddhist, you).
The point being, I have refrained from posting because, well, I was trying to figure out why I should post. I needed some reason beyond wanting to catalogue my day-to-day for people back home—which is absolutely a noble pursuit, but is an endeavor that, for me, is best fitted to text messages and emails and personal phone calls and postcards. And so I suppose this piece indicates that I have figured it out.
To a certain extent, I have. But my answer to this question continues to build and change, and I know it will continue to do so as long as I continue to write.
In any case, I am now at a place where I can reasonably say that I’m reasonably ready to post at—well, unreasonably irregular intervals, most likely. (Just bein' real.)
Regardless, the hopefully-literary/semi-literary updates and/or my fireside-chat creative nonfiction pieces (whaddup literary geeks) will begin to roll out. And so I suppose this post is an elaborate way of saying, first, “Hi, how are you?” (because what kind of person starts a one-sided conversation without first asking how everyone is?), and, second, that I’m still alive and engaged and loving and writing and that my posts with fun run-ons (<3 Virginia Woolf <3 Faulkner <3) will start to emerge from the woodwork/facebook statuses soon enough.
Until then—peace, love, and freaking biawaks.
Biawaks (in English, "monitor lizards") live in the sewers outside my and Shannon's house. Yes, they are this big. Yes, they are carnivorous. Yes, I am afraid of being eaten.
