mistakes i know i am making
i’ve been lazy again this week and riding the bus instead of biking to work. the upside is that i get offline reading done in the 20-minutes each way that i otherwise don’t find/make time to do. i finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and reading dave eggers on the bus every morning put me in a thoughtful and contemplative but good mood. now i’m reading The Informers, and reading Bret Easton Ellis on the bus in the morning does not so much put me in a good mood.
anyway, i know i am going to europe for the first time TOMORROW and so should write something maybe about that today also, but before i forget, in the appendix/addenda to AHWOSG, written later after the first publication, called Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, Eggers discusses the inevitable position that non-fictional, autobiographical writers get into, which is that, because we do not live solitary lives, we write about OTHER PEOPLE. and those other people may not like what you wrote about them, or the circumstance, or how you remember it, EVEN IF IT’S TRUE. or, maybe, i should say, ESPECIALLY IF IT’S TRUE. which i can understand, you know, from their perspective. your “dirty laundry” being published for the world to read. it might sting. it might put a huge brick-heavy damper on relationships. and this is something i’ve been faced with recently, what with my whole huge extended family joining The Facebook and realizing that i’ve been writing about my life here for, oh, 8 years now, and even though i try not to say too much about other people and personal things, i have done so, sometimes without really remembering and suddenly these ghosts from the past pop up and people are angry, disappointed, hurt. so just after a recent bout of this, i was reading the very end of the addenda of the book, and Eggers wrote something that made me feel, not…justified, but encouraged? to continue to be open and share. he says (more than once in the prelude and appendix, actually):
“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself….
…Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one’s past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way – not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I’ve-seen/lessons-I’ve-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.”
and i agree. so while i do deeply respect and recognize personal boundaries and have taken great care over the years to not represent anyone but myself (and honestly the family-related post that recently upset someone i didn’t even realize was publicly published – BLOGGER FAUX PAS), i also do not believe in covering up, hiding the parts that aren’t pretty. because i too believe that it does not make you less yourself, less valuable, to show your flaws. those with flawless facades are difficult to believe. they are hard to connect to. possibly this is why there is so much Schadenfreude in our human nature: because in the mistake we see others make, we see ourselves. and so sometimes i admit, when i hit that “publish” button, i know it might be a mistake, but the feedback (even if negative), the connectivity, always makes up for it.
(semi-related note that i couldn’t work into the text above: sometimes even people you don’t know get really offended by you writing about your own life. dooce.com, blogger of epic flaw-revealing proportions, has started publishing her hate mail and monetizing it. SUCH a good idea. haters suck.)
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