Now you see me

Writing the truth as I feel it

When I first started blogging years (decades?) ago, I wrote an almost daily journal called The Dream Life. I wrote about anything and everything - wanting a pug and then acquiring a pug, my attempts at making good buttercream cake frosting, being an aunt, travel, feeling blocked as a fiction writer.

As I moved through Reiki training and intuitive development, I wrote more and more about spirituality - my beliefs and experiences. My blog moved over to my own website. By that time, Facebook had come along and squashed personal blogging, but I continued with mine.

I wrote about journeys to the United Kingdom with my mother, and when I began painting again after a long hiatus, I wrote about art-making and creativity. At some point blogging became less about sharing a personal journal and more about sharing my work and, I suppose, some sort of marketing.

I’ve written a lot of words and posted them online.

So many words.

And through the act of writing words and posting them online, I have forged important relationships - with other people and with myself. Writing online has kept me alive as a writer through years of not writing other things. (I remember once a friend suggesting to me that perhaps if I didn’t post so much online I’d have more time and energy for fiction writing, but blogging was like an oxygen mask for me and the only hope my fiction writing had for survival.)

But the thing about writing online is, it is public in an immediate sort of way. Even as a tiny creator who has never written anything that’s even come close to going viral, I have had to navigate moments when my words hit a reader in the wrong way, incite argument, cause offense.

Slowly, covertly, over time, I allowed the public consumption of and response to my work to smooth my edges and turn me into a more palatable and therefore, washed-out version of myself. One thing I don’t ever want to do when I write is second guess how others are going to perceive me. If I think about how an audience might receive my words, I lose my grip on what it is I needed to say in the first place.

But that is precisely what happened to me as a blogger.

The private writing practice I’ve been engaging in with my friend Mandy, plus the writing I’ve been doing here on Substack feels like a loosened lightbulb getting screwed back into its socket - a reconnection to my essential voice. A return.

I’ve been writing lately about spiritual exploration - the beliefs and practices and ideas I’ve embraced and rejected. The other day, I told Tracy (who has known me since we were in high school) how I look back at things I wrote in the past - concepts I accepted, beliefs I held, identities I expressed - and I can’t relate to them at all. “Isn’t it so weird,” I asked. “I feel like a completely different person.”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” he said. “You commit to ideas, embody them, process them, then spit them out and move on.”

It’s true. I’m an all-or-nothing person. I don’t drift toward the middle of anything. I embrace or reject. I can’t relate to everything-in-moderation. I either do things or don’t do them. I binge on a food or abstain from it. It’s everyday or never for me. And so I have throughout my life, fully inhabited ideas then suddenly unzipped and stepped out of them the way you might shed a coat that has become too heavy.

Once when I was young, I overheard someone say about me, “She’s intense, isn’t she?”

Was I? Intense? What does that even mean? I wondered, but I think I understand now what they meant. In fact, if I’m honest, I can go pretty far back, to the very beginnings of my life, and point to the places where I learned in sudden and painful ways that I was too much.

It was revealed to me again and again that when I dropped the mask and allowed my true self to be seen and heard, I was hard for some people to take. I was polarizing, weird, even offensive.

It makes sense that as I wrote and shared content online, as I learned to navigate the minefield of early social media, I subconsciously toned myself down, softened my edges. I learned to re-shape myself into something less intense, something palatable.

What I’m finding here in my midlife is a complete and utter lack of desire to do that. I no longer have the mental or emotional energy for it. I no longer wish to think about how to grow my followers on Instagram or write a hook that will people watching a video. I can’t write a bio that sums up what my work will do for you because I have no idea. My work is my work. My words are my words. I have to write them. And I have to be who I am.

Those years ago when I named my blog The Dream Life, it was a phrase that held layers of meaning for me. One of those layers was my thirst to live a life that felt right to me, for me. I wanted to live my dream life, life as a creative person. I wanted to feel the the unfurling of the anxious fist that constantly clutched in my abdomen. I wanted to be free to express myself, my intensity.

Maybe that it was what is happening now, these years later. Sitting here this morning, I am much more in touch with the twenty-eight year old version of myself who was in graduate school viciously writing fiction, than the fifty year old version of myself carefully considering theologies.

At fifty-five, I have unzipped the cloak again and stepped out into territory that belongs to me. It feels good here. It feels alive. Intense.