That's just the beginning of the autobiography fail.
This return to my roots is a lot less glamorous than it might sound. There's no ancestral pilgrimage or quaint move back to my hometown or even a family tree on an ancestry site. I'm not even getting tattooed. Still, I am, in fact, returning to my roots. That space within me that I started with. My roots are my proving ground and my resting place.
This blog is my route there. It's the personal of my political, the teetering of my work/life balance, and the pleasure to my business.
But the problem with blogging and autobiography is that it is autobiography. Utterly reflexive and trapped by itself. This is why a room of mirrors is terrifying, why Cooper's journey to Black Lodge was a descent into abjection. Autobiography, this blog, can only reflect itself. How am I not myself?
I'll need checks and balances along the way to my roots. Already I know that time is one hell of a check on my balance. As much as I am who I am, I'm not the person I was ten years ago. Writing this blog, writing and reading myself over and over, could be shattering. (A BOB lurking? Even Cooper saw BOB in the mirror.)
It seems, then, that the self becomes the ultimate editor of the self in the blog. I hope to return to my roots, but can I really with all of this white space between my self and my written self?
Readers. Readers are another check, another editor. Blogs are an existential experiment. All I do, right? (write?!), is write myself and then read your comments. But as writer and editor, how am I not myself? I rewrite remake re-post my self.
I've constructed a nice home for my online self. It's up to time, reflection, and readers to deconstruct it.
That said, this is a little about me, in no particular order.
I am 35 years old. I am a pessimist, but tend toward idealism and, others tell me, I suffer because of this. I drink around 4 cups of coffee a day (it's healthy, I swear) and find myself singing Let It Go much too often. I am a feminist. I am a liberal with a dash of fiscal conservatism. I am cis, straight, I am white, I am middle class, I am able-bodied. I carry a lot of privilege that as soon as I unpack it, it folds up again and I have to start all over. I am a survivor. I am in a job that daily demands that I compromise my values. I am in a job that I do as my mission because I have a passion for justice, but I doubt more and more that it is my calling. I am married and in love and learn about love every day. He deserves to be loved so much better than I give now. I have two little ones and love motherhood more than I ever thought I could. I love Jesus so much and not enough and this grieves me. I am a Steelers fan...ergo, I am a person of great contradictions. I am jaded, which is not very like Christ. I love literature and writing and postmodern theory and feminist theory, but love modernist literature the most. I have a mental health diagnosis--a dual diagnosis!--of major depressive disorder (with dysthymia) and PTSD (Vonnegut would say: faulty wiring). I have a BA and I'm a seminary graduate. I have decided against law school as a means to justice. I love birds and gardening.
I am a minefield of potential blog topics.
I'm trying to parse myself, to find the roots, the impetus, and meaning behind it all. There are days or moments that I truly cannot figure out the meaning (or why that word weighs so much and means so much), days where I stand in solidarity with Qohelith: everything is meaningless. Then there are days or moments when I get it. Lately, it's been a manic swing between both. But I have to believe that the meaningless days are a symptom of faulty wiring and not the truth.
Say it with me (uh, with me and Hemingway): It's pretty to think so.
These are my confessions. My journey home. This is my participation in the dialogue, my oeuvre, palimpsest, and all that.