A dear friend once told me about a blog (not sure if it exists anymore) called something like “Blogging without Apology.” It’s an endearing and, I daresay, empowering statement, the idea being that blogging should always be in the service of the writer rather than the audience. After all, blogs began largely as online personal journals, existing to chronicle their authors’ inner lives and exterior circumstances and how one impacts the other. Nowadays, of course, so many of them are an odd hybrid of the personal and the professional, with ad networks and corporate sponsorships and even the FCC weighing in with its rules governing how bloggers treat product samples (why aren’t magazines and newspapers held to the same standards, I wanna know).
But most authentic blogs — not the ones that are launched by folks who simply want to cash in on monetized blog craze, but the genuine articles, the ones that are created primarily because their writers can’t help but express themselves, and what better way than to have one’s very own electronic journal? — birthed nowadays still hold on to the promise that the deeply personal need never apologize for itself. That if there are big, big gaps in publication dates, it’s because, well, life is messy. Life is demanding. Life gets in the way of everything, even our very best intentions. Life couldn’t care less about deadlines, SEO, publication schedules, or monetization.
Of course, as I write this, I realize that this overly long introduction to this post serves almost like an apology itself. And perhaps it is, more as an apology to myself and my writing muse rather than to anyone else in particular. I launched this blog several years ago (2006!) as a way not only to find a creative outlet for my Francophilia but also to connect with fellow Francophiles, the ones who care more about literature and art and music rather than whether or not French Women Don’t Get Fat (although I love love love that book and secretly reread it every year).
It’s been a few years, of course, and this blog has taken an odd and sometimes unsatisfying route to the present. It’s been in the New York Times. It’s been neglected. It’s bloomed with book reviews and music reviews and even an interview with one of my modern heroes, Mariane Pearl. It’s allowed me to meet writers, my very favorite people in the entire world. It’s also been an ongoing experiment in the way in which creativity and commerce can both clash and connect — I’ve had ads on this site, including AdSense ads and even privately purchased ads, most of which have allowed me to buy the occasional cafe au lait (never more than a Small, natch).
Since then I’ve launched a different kind of creative outlet: a company that still struggles to find its footing, although growing in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Like the blog that helped pave the way for it, the company is opening new doors and opportunities for me. It’s both exciting and frightening, and sometimes I just default to a kind of tunnel vision, where I simply look at the next deadline ahead and hope that I make it to pursue the next one. Is that how it is to build a company? Is that how it is to build a life?
I’m still trying to figure it all out. My writing has suffered, that’s for sure, and that’s probably why I’ve retreated once again to this, the blog that started it all. Writing — from the time I was about seven years old and learning my way around a noisy but deeply satisfying IBM Selectric in my stepdad’s home office — has always been my salvation and my refuge. Not writing gives me hives. Not writing raises my blood pressure. (Seriously.) Not writing makes me grind my teeth and night. Not writing makes me question everything: my raison d’etre, my choices in life, my career, even my daily task list. When you love the written word as profoundly and madly as I do, the absence of it can be positively terrifying.
And so I’m back. I’m back to save my soul and my sanity. I’m back because blogging in a corporate environment can really suck the wind out of you. I’m back because blogging for money, while great for the bottom line, can make you feel so out of balance that you get dizzy and need medication. (Did you know there are a million treatments for bruxism, i.e., teeth grinding? And that none of them have thus far worked for me?)
In the absence of the written word, so many things can rush to fill in the void, but while they may lovingly and deceptively stroke the ego, they do absolutely nothing to nourish the soul. And when the soul is hungry and underfed and craving nutrition, it eventually finds a way to slap you to attention. The soul can be a bitch that way.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 1 comment }
Reading this reassured me, so in the very least I had to express my great pleasure that you are back with My Inner French Girl. I last wrote you a fan note not long after I published a book on Albert Camus, when in a wonderful blog about the new corporate climate in publishing, you reflected on the fact that back in the 1950′s Camus was not under pressure to blog and tweet and market his books but simply to write them. At the time I was miserable trying to blog about Camus or my work or related events in the steady and breezy way that I was expected to, and I had fallen on your words with gratitude and joy. Now, a year and a half later, working on smaller pieces but not yet deep into a new book, desperately missing the full immersion and solitary ways of writing, I am wandering around wondering who I am, growing mean and moody, clenching my teeth at night (refusing the recommended tooth guard, which is irrelevant), identifying with your thoughts and once again sending you my sincere thanks.
Comments on this entry are closed.