I don't really consider myself a writer, so I'm not going to say I'm having a bad case of writer's block. Instead, I'm going to stick to "mental block", "or "blogger's block", or whatever "block"-affixed name unpublished web 2.0 people come up with to describe how they are unable to find inspiration to put words to virtual paper. I have a slew of explanations for this lack of activity, like microblogging, movies, novels, work, life, etc, but one thing that this "block" thing is not a manifestation of is a seeming lack of material to write something.
I have, as a matter of fact, a list of things I want to blog about. They're all tightly packed inside my noggin, and I have even jotted down a few things somewhere to remind me of some life stuff that I need to document in a blog. Things that I want to remember in the future, that I have been busy with in the middle of 2008, because lord knows this will go down in my history as that point where I stumbled upon an emotional breakthrough. But one problem about documenting this point in my long timeline of maturation is my newfound zest for trying to attain a certain level of reticence.
Retiwhadidyusei?
I have, in my 5 years of blogging in many varying URLs, each with names weirder than the ones they replaced, blurted out secrets as blunt as your daily dose of showbiz gossip. I used to think, hey, I don't step on anybody's shoes, nor destroy the core of my moral being with my everyday actions, so why must I feel ashamed to let the world know about EVERYTHING concerning my life? And that's when blogging about every secret I hold so dear was born. I have in the past talked about sex, drugs and violen- ok not really, but short of naming names, I have suggested every perilously personal detail in blogs. So vivid was my description of things, that it came to a point where I could feel a stalker easily inferring my home address, my parent's address, my work details, my coworker's names, my friends' names and faces, all just from being regularly updated with my blogs. Blogs are, after all, whatever personal information one volunteers to strangers.
But you know what? It's not about feeling shame if your readers do not approve of the life that they picture in your blogs. It's not even the negative things anybody might make of the things you do and the words you say, online or offline. In the few more years I walked on this planet, I did learn one important thing: Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he said "My life is for itself and not for a spectacle". You may opt to live it fabulously for others to be awed, or you may live it beautifully in the shadows, as intense and as Romantic as you would like to remember it by. Who cares that nobody else notices? It's your life, it's real, it's there for the taking.
That, I guess, is the gift only your older, darker years can give. The ability to really not give a rat's ass what others think. Young people say it a lot, but they say it with too much angst, that you end up thinking, hey emo dood, shut up and slash your wrists already. When you really stop caring for opinions other than your own, you stop explaining too much. You stop describing yourself. You even end up trying to hide a few attention-drawing things, especially around people who want to open you up so they can read you like a book. Because your enjoyment out of your life comes from a sense of peace with the fact that you've grown too old to become a space cowboy or a superstar, and rather than try to drastically change little things about yourself so others will find and revel in your awesomeness, you start seeing your own forest for your trees. And with this comes the celebration of yourself, and loving yourself just the way you are.
Enter reticence, the inclination to keep your thoughts, feelings, and personal affairs to yourself. This could mean a world of monstrously deceptive ways to mask real thoughts and feelings, or this could only mean laying back and watching people try to blow every point of entry through your hard shell of mystery and fail miserably. Either way, it's one's haven of self-respect, and the need to feel a comforting sense of privacy. When you come across someone with a similar thinking, the initial knee-jerk observation may be aloof, inhibited, annoyingly cagey, unfriendly, sexually repressed piece of bore. But heck, people, even introverts are different from each other. If you can find in you some kind of understanding, please know that for some, silence comes from a sincere sense of inner peace, and that the smiles and the lack of words that you see comes not from a calculated secrecy of things that are embarrassing and better off hidden from everybody, but from some level of respectable effacement, all in the interest of modesty and self-preservation.
On that note, the list of future blogs I plan on writing may be personal, but will probably come in the form of short fiction. Once again, I don't consider myself a writer, so the fictional blogs will probably be pieces of MEH entirely deserving of your flak. But just read on, and know that every person, place or event may really mean two or more persons, places or events, and that these stories were created more for the therapy of the author than for the entertainment of the reader. I wish to not describe every real detail as is, hence the fiction, and that's the way it's going to be from this point on.
So, to start off, here's the shortest piece of profound literature known to man. My all-time favorite flash.
- Ernest Hemingway
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