Blogging denial
I reread Edith’s Diary last week. It always makes me think of blogs. In case you haven’t read it, it’s a novel about a woman’s who life is truly wretched but the worse it gets, the happier her diary reads. Her son is an alcoholic, lazy misanthrope but in her diary he’s married and has lovely children. She is living two lives and as the false one becomes more real, the more stuck she is in the wretchedness. It’s a frustrating book; you want to shake her loose of her fantasies so she’ll face up to how bad it all is and do something.
I remember watching this friendship implode from the sidelines once. There were two bloggers who were best friends in a larger circle of bloggers (I knew them from an online forum where I was a lurker so it may be that some of you know them but I doubt it). I don’t know what happened but there was a huge falling out. I got a heads up from someone else on that forum (my connection there who inspired my lurkdom) and I — like everyone else — watched the whole thing fall apart. It was big. It was bad. It was ugly. There were secrets shared, confidences exposed for the world to mock, some ugly language thrown around.
It was one of those trainwrecks that ripples across blogs because people take sides. I pieced it together backwards, hunting down archived entries and skipping around links to figure out how it started.
Anyway. The most interesting part to me is that one of the people just went nuts. She used to write like a regular person — you know, life’s ups and downs — and then suddenly everything was peachy keen and the sun shone all the time and every morning they all woke up and danced around the maypole together.
Now my connection had some inside scoop on this person’s real life and of course it wasn’t like that (because whose real life is?) but the picture got brighter and brighter. She was losing weight! And running marathons! And her children were cleaner and smarter and better behaved than anyone’s!
Of course she was writing it for her ex-friend (whose own blog stayed noncommittal and everyday) to let her know that her life was awesome and she didn’t even care that they weren’t friends anymore. Take that!
I think I would have been a blog denial writer myself if I’d been blogging in my teens. I’d likely have created an alter ego and made a virtual life that was nicer and more manageable than my real one. Actually (thinking more on it) I betcha I would have blogged as one of the characters in the stories I was always scrawling. You know, to make ‘em more real.
Because that’s what Edith was doing and what this other blogger was doing — making a better life real by writing it down.
I guess I do a certain amount of this, too. I write an argument with Brett only make it funny and by the end of the entry I’m not as angry with him anymore. (That’s a tip for you — you can now read the subtext of any entries about that adorable Brett and his quirky way of doing things. You now know that I start those entries with gritted teeth, glaring at the monitor.) See, that’s a way of rewriting a narrative to bring yourself to a happier conclusion but it’s not lies. Because truthfully my conflicts with Brett are minor and sometimes I need reminding about that.
With Edith’ blogging counterpart, her denial was so damaging. She couldn’t make it so just by writing it. A sham doesn’t become more solid just because she’s shouting that it’s true. Instead she just pushed people away because a) they figured she didn’t need them anyway since life was so dandy; b) and they knew she was lying and it was kinda creepy.
But the thing is with blogging is that eventually that blogger got her some new readers who didn’t have backstory so they took her at her word and so it was like her imaginary life was true, at least for them and she could take comfort in their comments that affirmed it.
This is why I’m glad there was no interwebz when I was a disgruntled teenager. I think the nature of having so much control over a virtual life would have messed me up for a little while longer than I was messed up all on my own. Truly.
Is this about me? Cuz my life is PRECIOUS, dammit!
wow. interesting on so many levels. that i cannot get into but yeah, i agree.
The late Shirley Jackson, author of the famous short story The Lottery, wrote a book about her family called Raising Demons. Yeah, the kids are demons, but there’s something so confident about her voice that you get the feeling she’s one of those perfect 50’s mom in the nip-waisted flair-skirted dresses, pearls, and pointy shoes. She never *says* that her kids are perfectly neat but somehow you get that impression. Women wrote to her, begging to know her secret, how she managed home and family with such ease.
Of course she did nothing of the kind. If I’m remembering a biography correctly, one of her children states that he or she didn’t brush his/her teeth for about a year because Shirley never checked. When another child spent the night at a friend’s house, the other mom had to bathe the kid because the child was appallingly dirty. Shirley didn’t take care of her own health, either, and I believe she died of a heart attack. Oh, and her college professor husband wasn’t exactly committed to monogamy. But you can’t tell any of that from Raising Demons.
You know I think about this sometimes. It’s not that I’m trying to hide the unpleasant parts of my life, I just usually consider them more private. Sometimes I talk about them, but usually in vague terms. Or else I write when I’m in white hot rage or angst and later regret that I did. Also, they usually have to do with someone else too, so I don’t always feel right exposing someone else’s flaws or pain.
So I think I likely have a different persona online than IRL, but my guess is you could still tell the two were related.
I’m with you. I write stuff that I’m not happy about and as I write about it, I can put it into better perspective and then I feel so much better about it. Or, I’ll write about something negative only AFTER I’ve gotten a better grip on the situation. But that’s always been my nature. To “spin.” Not in a negative misleading way but to try and see the good in situations. My sisters and I do this a lot when one of us is struggling with something. We literally say, “Hmmmm, let’s see how we can spin this.” We always can find the silver lining. Even when we don’t like it, we concede that it’s there in all it’s ugly truth. (Because sometimes even “the silver lining” sucks the big one.)
Wow, this is pretty disturbing to me. I hope all the people I read are really being honest. Well, I’m pretty sure they are :-).
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t use writing as a tool to bring myself to a better perspective. But I think about this too - there are sometimes big things that I omit from the storyline in blogging, most often because I’d feel like I was violating someone else’s privacy. And that can make what I’m writing feel incomplete.
I used to get down on myself because I felt inferior to the bloggers I was reading. Then I started writing my own blog and realised how much I had to sugercoat my life to make it readable. (Which is largely why my blogging attempt was so shortlived.) The realisation that all bloggers were likely doing that to some extent was a relief.
Also, I think I know the blogger you’re talking about, and I have to say that now when I hear/read someone bragging about how they only ever feed their children healthful, organic meals, I wonder just how often they’re eating at McDonalds.
(Oh, I also wanted to let you know that when I view this in Firefox, there’s a huge gravatar icon that sits on top of the comments and makes it hard to read. Apologies if you’ve addressed this somewhere else and I missed it.)
Katerina, I’m using firefox, too but it looks ok here. Are you on a Mac or a PC? And what version of FF do you have? (Thanks for the heads up on that!)
The blogger I’m talking about was blogging all this in about 2003ish, I think. And I believe she stopped blogging soon after but I haven’t gone looking (she took down her old blog after awhile saying that her life was so full of joy that she no longer had need of internet friends unlike SOME people who were unhealthy and stupid such as her ex-friend. She was some kind of crazy!).
Adding Edith’s Diary to my reading list. Sounds fascinating! And sounds like perfect beach reading.
MsF: as someone not new to blogging, you’ll read it and likely start thinking of some blog denial types yourself!!!!