Following up, in an oblique way, on yesterday’s post, I have been thinking a lot recently about this blog and the perils of its existence. Sometimes I get positive feedback from people who like the way I write, or find something helpful in what I am saying because it aids either their understanding of themselves or of others, and I really love it when that happens – not just because it pleases my ego, but because it means this isn’t a pointless exercise (or, more accurately, an exercise whose beneficial effects are localised to myself). Of course the impulse to write is of myself and the primary reason for producing the endless reams of windy neurotic hyperbole is to satisfy that impulse in an effort for some kind of catharsis, but we could question why, then, I make the inner workings of my brain a product for public consumption. This question is never far from my mind, because for every comment I have in praise of this place, I have five people utterly mystified as to why I would ever put so much of myself on ‘the internet’ (this always said with a touch of horror, a slight recoil as if to suggest I am certifiably bonkers).
I put the internet in scare quotes because it has become mythologised. ‘The internet’ stands for the ultimate public arena and due to the over-awareness of online scams, people posing as other identities, people having their online actions used against them in ‘real life’ (or suffering the consequences of them at least), etc., it has in many ways become a source of fear. We are at once dismissive of the internet, distinguishing it from so-called ‘real’ life, and terrified of the potential presented by the anonymity it affords its users. We still haven’t learned how to tread the balance, online, between what is private and what is public, between what is professional and what is personal. The internet is still very new, and most people who use it now were not early adopters; when the internet was in its beginning stages it was a very different kind of place.
I’m not denying that there are people who use and abuse the internet in just the same way there are people who use and abuse anything they conceivably can, and that the diffuse nature of the internet makes it harder for people to protect themselves because it’s less clear where their information is going, how far it reaches, and who will pass it on. I admit to being particularly lax when it comes to things like shredding my bank statements, or even thinking about doing such a thing, so I’m bound to be expounding the lackadaisical approach to the online universe (a more ranty version of my attitude to self-protection online occurred in an email to my father a few months ago) but I’m afraid I just can’t bring myself to care. As with ‘real’ life, on the internet you have to balance trusting your instincts against the possibility that you are wrong against the possibility that some people are just bastards against spending all your time and energy trying to protect yourself against the simple fact that some things are completely unavoidable. This is one of my many ‘unrealistic’, ‘idealistic’, ‘immature’, ‘naive’, ‘irresponsible’ points of view. But it is a calculated risk and I do accept responsibility for any outcomes: on weighing up those balances I have decided that trying to work out how cautious to be is not worth the amount of time and energy it takes to decide. I’m not stupid, I’m not reckless, but I’m also not going to stress myself out about all the possible bad things that could happen – that’s a slippery slope to start rolling down. I also reject this excessive emphasis on security because it takes us into victim-blaming territory; there is no way around the fact that if someone uses your information to harm you they are in the wrong, regardless of whether you made that information available to them or not. I’m not claiming that this means it’s a good idea to go around leaving yourself open to whatever havoc might be wreaked just because you get the glow of having a moral high ground while you’re living on your best friend’s floor because some fucker wiped your bank account and you couldn’t pay rent, I’m just pointing to the automatic questions we/the police/the law/insurance companies ask when the havoc happens – the questions that subtly suggest you could have prevented the havoc, that you left temptation out there and therefore the havoc is your fault because don’t you know these poor criminals just can’t help themselves? Like this idea that if your front door is unlocked and a team of bastards clean you out it isn’t theft. That if your partner has sex with you without your permission it isn’t rape. That if you make your address available on Facebook then someone lurking outside it isn’t stalking.
I know it isn’t how it works, but I would like to think our society was founded on trusting other people not to screw us over. And that because we have that we don’t screw them over either. The eminently practical will point out that our society, alas, is no longer founded on this trust and that therefore it is nothing short of immensely stupid not to protect oneself adequately against the risks posed by Other People. They will tell me that I have to be realistic and work with things the way they are because otherwise I am vulnerable. But you know what? I don’t. I don’t have to be realistic, and I can strive as much as possible not to work with things the way they are, and maybe that will make me vulnerable but at least I will know it. And being vulnerable isn’t so bad anyway. The most dangerous thing is to think you aren’t vulnerable, because it comes as such a shock when you inevitably realise that you are. All that time and effort and energy you spent guarding the front door, you were so absorbed in it you never noticed an intruder sneaking in the back.
I think the more we focus on how dangerous ‘things’ are the more we create danger. By subtly shifting towards this mindset where people’s actions are only really wrong if they had to work hard to do wrong we remove the crime from the criminal and give it instead to the victim. Which in turn creates a way of thinking that suggests that easily committed crimes are in fact not wrongdoing – that if someone was ‘asking for it’ then this should be taken advantage of. That ‘don’t leave your bags unattended’ very quickly stops being a precautionary reminder to keep an eye on your stuff in case some rogue makes off with it and becomes shorthand for ‘unattended bags are fair game for thieves because it was very very silly of you to leave it so unprotected’; so we all become paranoid that everyone is trying to steal our stuff, and anyone minded to steal begins to consider all property that isn’t under lock and key to be liftable. Again, I must iterate that I’m not suggesting I have a solution to this problem or that I think it’s a bad idea to warn people of particular dangers, I’m just observing that we are placed in tricky territory with scaremongering – most of the time it starts out as a simple, sensible piece of advice, but in the Chinese whispers game of life no utterance ever remains simple and sensible for long. Fear begets fear begets paranoia begets paranoia. And, where possible, I don’t want to participate in that. Call me naive and unrealistic if you like, but I’m not. Suddenly The X-Files flits into my mind (bear with me, I am going somewhere with this, I promise…). Fox Mulder is a great example of someone who is considered nuts by his peers – ‘Spooky’ Mulder – and whose obsession with aliens, government conspiracies, etc., make him a figure of mockery regaled with accusations of being unrealistic and deluded. But I am minded of his poster:
I want to believe. Do I think that the world is a nice cuddly place in which bad things only happen because we have made room for them happening? No. Do I think I will not suffer as a result of my decision to act in certain ways? No. I choose to trust. I want to believe that it is possible to trust and not be fucked over. I accept that sometimes I will be fucked over regardless. But if we get to this point where we’re all so cynical, where we assume we can’t trust anyone or anything unless there is evidence to the contrary, what hope do we have? Innocent until proven guilty and yet I can’t help thinking that’s not really how things work these days; to save time we seem to doubt first and let people in once they’ve earned their dues. I don’t want it to be that way.
Which, at greater length than I intended, is a segue into the original subject of this post. I suppose that’s part of why I make so much public, as some small act of defiance. Mostly I just don’t get the horror of it; I thoroughly respect everyone’s right to reveal what they wish to and by no means do I wish or expect anyone else to go around spilling the inner contents of their consciousness all over the place, but I find it difficult to fathom what people think is going to happen. B, one of the most incredulous observers of my online splurge-fest, said it’s ‘dangerous’, and other people have indicated similar responses… but why? I mean, really really why? There is one argument for not revealing things like bank details, addresses, etc., and I can see the practical reason for that, but what about the emotional stuff? That’s what they’re really speaking of, because honestly I think if anyone is looking to defraud me this blog is not going to give them much to go on. As with matters of financial security, I’m not much in the business of protecting myself emotionally either, but I’m so intrigued by what is specifically dangerous about publishing my emotional landscape online. It’s probably not just online, actually, but anywhere very public (i.e. no-one seems to have an issue with ‘personal’ stuff being discussed between friends, or in confession, or with a therapist), and these days the internet is our main public forum as well as being this nebulous space that is a cause for no small amount of consternation in and of itself.
So the rub here is with the publicness of the personal. One assumes the issue can’t be about over-sharing because no-one has to read this; new posts are advertised on Facebook and Twitter but I wouldn’t say it’s intrusive, and it is possible to hide the alerts. There are two potential negative effects that I can think of, and they’re the only things that ever give me pause. One is that people I already know will read this and take objection to some of the things I say and they won’t want to be friends with me any more. The other is that people I don’t know will read it and hate me before we’ve even got to know each other, and that I will render myself undateable because all of the neuroses that most people keep hidden are all out there already.
In the case of the former, that’s just a risk I have to take – the things I say are the things I think, and there is always the potential in any relationship that you find out something about someone that suddenly renders the whole thing in a different light. I may decrease my popularity, and every time I publish a new entry I live in small fear of someone taking offence at it, but if there are any disastrous consequences they will only be the result of what is true. I am afraid again that I’m doing my naive unrealistic act here, in assuming that the best and most fundamental basis for relationships of any kind is in truth and honesty rather than occlusion. Maybe I’m wrong to say that I reject relationships that only survive because they keep some things hidden, that any relationship that cannot survive the full revelation of the people’s characters is not a relationship worth having. Maybe I really will end up friendless if I follow that route. Maybe relationships in fact are predicated on selective ignorance, selective veiling, a wilful desire to not see the incompatibilities. All I can say is that I absolutely don’t want them to be, but that doesn’t stop me from being a human being, and even as I say it I hear the idealistic tone in there, the thread of certainty that another part of me scoffs at – you want relationships to be honest? You want truth? You ‘absolutely don’t want’ relationships to be about what is hidden? Child! You presume to know what you hide or what you reveal? You presume to know how best these things work? You think you know what you want? Child! I suppose my fear is that I’m wrong, that relationships cannot survive the full truth, and that every time I reveal more of myself I am destroying my relationships bit by bit.
In the case of the second point, with respect to new relationships, well… that’s just a fact. New relationships are built on mystery, on not displaying certain things about oneself until the opportune moment so they don’t scare people away. Being one of these people who happily tells anyone anything, I am not very good at meeting new people. Romantic relationships are properly disastrous in that respect… I have no sense of how to hold myself back, everything comes tumbling out and I always justify it with ‘they would’ve found out sooner or later’ but I’m starting to realise that the temporality is quite important. Once someone likes you it’s harder to scare them off with neuroses. You show this stuff right at the beginning and they’re running for the hills faster than you can say fuckingcoward. And again, I want to believe that there are people out there who are not terrified of the idea of real human beings and are quite okay with not pretending that they are having drinks with Ms Perfecto McPerfect. I suppose I want to believe that there are people who see through this, who appreciate this, who are not afraid or perturbed by it. Because really I don’t think anything that I say or feel is very different to anything that anyone else says or feels, the only difference is that I express it more freely, more often, and with less discrimination. I’m not saying that I expect anyone else to feel comfortable being so open, or that I think I’m better than anyone, or that I think it’s a good thing – I would just like not to be seen as insane for putting it out there. Out there or in here, it’s still just what I think and feel. I don’t stop thinking and feeling it just because I stop expressing it.
That said, there is still a looming question mark over the expression of it. Why express it? Sure, I find writing it cathartic in a way that talking isn’t, but why publish it in public? To, of all places, the unregulatable internet? Well, this is complicated. Firstly there is the writing issue. I prefer writing to talking partly because I am not verbally inclined (although I’m sure those who sit near me in the office would disagree as they listen to me ejaculate my frustration to myself all day) and I can organise my thoughts better in writing. It comes naturally. And when I have written something it leaves my brain, at least for a bit, whereas when I talk it I never feel like it’s gone anywhere. I find quite often when I speak I have no idea what I’ve just said – I made some kind of automatic response and didn’t even hear myself. Also, importantly, speaking is usually a dialogue and, terrible as this may be, when it comes to talking out problems I usually find the input of others unhelpful. Writing is just my thing. I think in words (DON’T laugh – I thought everyone thought in words but I was recently told otherwise), but not just in words, in narrative – when I was a child I used to narrate what I was doing to myself in my head as I was doing it, but in the third person as if I were a character in a book (probably I have some kind of psychological illness… another one). These days I compose blog entries (most of which don’t get written because I would have to spend all the time I spend thinking of them writing them and then I would end up spending my whole life just transcribing my thoughts and never having any actual life) or hold conversations with people. I don’t know how other people think, so I don’t know if it’s ‘normal’ – forgive me if I’m just stating what thinking is – but my thoughts are self-reflective. As in, I know that I am thinking and think about the thinking; I don’t have much time in which thoughts just waft over me, they’re composed thoughts that read in my head the same way they do here (or, I suppose, this actually is a transcription of my thoughts, hence why it’s sometimes a bit whirly and I get distracted from the thing I was intending to talk about). So the act of writing I find cathartic and purging, but also it’s a way of anchoring thought, of having it as a reference later, a move towards creating a sort of virtual life that can be reconstituted. I have observed that most of the things I do are geared towards nailing down, making permanent, taking the transient and not permitting it to fade away. Photographs are of the tiny things that no-one notices; poems are about one brief moment; blog entries used to be largely reviews of live music, events that can never be experienced again. I’ve been reading too much Freud to go into an interpretation of why everything must be made concrete and organised and pinned down – I’m bound to discover I’m a hysteric.
Writing is fair enough. Lots of people like writing. Lots of people find it helpful. In their private journal. I’m not the only person expunging a personal load all over the internet by any stretch of the imagination, but as I now find myself outside the circles where that’s commonplace I find it’s anathema to most. In one way I just have a history with the internet and it feels quite natural for me to use it in this way. When I first started going online, in 1999, it was mainly a community of the marginalised. The population of most message boards and chat rooms was small, you bumped into people from one website on another website, and there was virtually no social networking in the way we think of it now (i.e. it was message boards and forums rather than sites where users constructed a stable digital version of their identity like MySpace or Facebook). I had a LiveJournal account and I poured myself into it – I was 14, I was having a horrible time, and writing helped. I never made it private because there was no-one to read it aside from the friends I’d made through LJ or other communities – people just didn’t know about the internet. I mean, they knew it existed obviously, but there was a limit to what you could do unless you really committed yourself to becoming part of the community. Connection was slow, expensive, and with such little traffic it didn’t inspire most people at that time – not until MySpace came into vogue and broadband meant you could actually load images without watching them appear pixel by pixel. But by the most incredible luck, I stumbled upon an abandoned Tori Amos newsgroup at the same time as a handful of other people, and we became great friends and I was hooked by the internet. Even for back then it was incredibly basic – a constant plain-text stream with an input box at the bottom; you wrote a message and it came up under the previous one, so there was a chronological flow of writing, no threads or anything. We used to communicate about ourselves and lives, but we also had a running story that we all contributed sections to – the chronological format (unusual even then to have the newest things at the bottom so it read in order) was perfect for that kind of ongoing project. The newsgroup and LiveJournal revolutionised my life. They kind of were my life – which is why I always find this ‘real’ life distinction funny – and I found love and acceptance online that was absolutely missing from my daily existence, in which I was an ostracised, unpopular, unhappy teenager with a truckload of mental health problems, a mild eating disorder, and a penchant for slicing my arms open whenever I got the chance. Yes, I was a walking cliche. But in seriousness, the community I found online saved me. And people would ask how I knew they were ‘real’ people and how could I even say I knew them at all and what if they were 40-year-old men with sawn-off shotguns? Well, you just know. You know if you’re talking to a real human being, especially when you’re speaking on the phone and sending letters. People forget quite easily that just because you originally encountered each other online it doesn’t mean you can’t also use more traditional methods of communication.
Of course, chatting on the phone is one thing but when I proposed a trip to Canada to meet them my dad almost went into orbit. And I went into Canada. I met G in London, flew to New York, met N there, then got the train to Montreal to meet M for the dawn of the year 2000. After that I met more people from the UK and I’m still in contact with all of the people I was close to back then – most of them are now just some of my oldest and best friends and I forget that we even met through the internet originally. Anyway, again I am sidetracked by reminiscences, but my point I think was that for me the internet is a refuge, a home, a place where I found acceptance and friendship, and a place that I still can’t quite believe is so huge and accessible. It used to be a challenge to find people online – there weren’t networking profiles, search engines were crappy until Google hit, and hardly anyone was looking anyway. The chances of stumbling upon someone were very slim so it felt safe to have stuff ‘out there’. I suppose I’ve never quite removed that way of engaging with the online world. When I see that people have found this blog through search engines I’m always a bit amazed (I love seeing what search terms brought people here, though – my favourite recent one is ‘why has my belly button been squashed’), or when people I don’t know start following it, because I can’t quite fathom that genuine strangers might be reading. It’s not an unpleasant idea, it’s just strange to think that anyone finds it interesting enough. Maybe that’s another strand of why I put it out there – in one way I don’t ever really think anyone will actually bother to wade their way through all my ramblings.
There are other reasons, though, and whilst they’re not worrying in terms of making the content any more ‘dangerous’, they probably signal bad things about me. I can see a craving for recognition, a need to be seen, a want to be understood, a desire to offload myself indiscriminately because I’m too lazy to make a judgement about whether or not to trust people, a perverse determination to make myself uncomfortable (because as much as I say I don’t have qualms about opening up the personal to the public, it’s not quite true – I just force myself through the discomfort as a way of breaking down shame… the only reason I don’t want certain things to be public knowledge is because I am ashamed of thinking/feeling them, but I’ve been trying, over the past few years, to be honest about the way I am in the hope that it enables me to accept it). For whatever reason, part of the catharsis is in the purging being public. If I just wrote this out and published it as a private entry it wouldn’t have the same effect. Whether people actually read it or not is secondary; the important thing is the potential that it could be read. Somehow it makes it feel less like a gigantic waste of time. I do the same thing with my MySpace music page – I’m a terrible musician but it seems less indulgent to spend an hour noodling away on an out of tune guitar if at the end I have something to show for it and an audience – even if only a theoretical one – to show it to.
I’m not sure I’ve reached any epiphanies about why I do this. If any of the questioners are reading, perhaps it helps answer your mystification, but I’m still undecided. All the things I’ve said are true and are part of it, but I fear that the drive to do this open house type thing on my inner world comes from an unhealthy impulse that I’ve been trying to eradicate – the impulse to escape myself by making someone else take my me instead. Typically that would be in a relationship; I would give myself completely to the other person because I was just so relieved to be rid of me, I’d prostrate myself at their feet and let them pick me over, deciding what they wanted and what they didn’t, giving all of myself and asking nothing in return so I could avoid being responsible for myself any more. I’ve made progress on this, but I still have a tendency to grant free access far too easily – whether I trust too quickly or I’m so insecure that I use this as a ploy because I’m afraid they won’t stick around to find out who I really am I don’t know. I can’t be sure that this doesn’t factor in the externalisation of the internal that I’ve been talking about; I can’t be sure I’m not still just looking for validation and saying ‘love me, want me, see me’.
