Dear Diary

When I was about 11, someone gave me a diary. It was the usual sort for girls: some kind of pink pattern on the outside, a flimsy brass lock, gold-lined paper. I would shut myself in my room, put The Carpenters' Rainy Days and Mondays on the record-player, and set out to write My Thoughts and Feelings About Life. I did this religiously for about three days, but subsided after I realized that 1) I didn't feel comfortable expressing my deepest thoughts on paper; 2) I wasn't sure I knew what my deepest thoughts were anyway; 3) my second-deepest thoughts weren't really that interesting; and 4) someone might read it.

For the next decade or so, I shifted to poetry, adopting the style of whoever I happened to be reading at the time. The trajectory went something like this:

Ogden Nash ---> Homer ----> Sylvia Plath ---> Sylvia Plath ---> W.B. Yeats ---> John Ashbery ---> various French Surrealists filtered through bitter and pretentious older boyfriend...

Again, the life experience problem. I wasn't middle-aged and/or wry, blind, Greek, suicidal, Irish, French or an emigre. I had not lived in Europe. I had not seen wars, the Louvre, an orgy, death, or experienced a relationship lasting longer than a semester. Worst of all, I had no world-weariness (except the type affected by twenty-somethings who have seen Breathless and Jules and Jim too many times).

Then I discovered translation. The advantage was clear: I could do something creative without having actually to write anything original myself. Unfortunately, I didn't know Italian that well, and it's painstaking work. Finally I started working, and eventually gave up writing altogether. But I still thought of myself as a writer.

When I started this blog, I had no grand ambitions for it. Yes, I wanted to tell our story, connect with other people and preserve the thread of these experiences. But I didn't want it to be about Me and My Deep Thoughts, and I never really thought of it as writing per se.

I'm making a lot of resolutions this year. The obvious ones, yes. But I also resolve to let go of my ambivalence about Writing And What It All Means and just tell this story, wherever it takes us, whatever it says about us, however it may unfold.

Comments

[drama mama]

I love this. This is what I preach over and over to my students: Tell the story. Don't make it "good".

Just DO it.

[Emily]

This was a funny post. Hilarious, really. I like your writing--you do what drama mama preaches--you just tell the story. Whitterer on Autism does the same thing, and I just love it.

Strangely, I was at one point wry, Irish, suicidal, a Louvre veteran and a veteran of a long relationship (called marriage heading to divorce) and of seeing death--and I was only 22. Now, I'm just mostly Irish and almost middle aged, yet I feel my writing is much much better than it was back then. At least considerably less lurid or purple or histrionic or whatever modifier best describes that pre-maturity hyperverbal affliction. ;) Write on, sistah.

[Jordan]

I for one am thrilled that you are telling your story. For you, and for all of us. Keep at it!