One year ago today, feeling a little overwhelmed by the changes in my life (the loss of an amazing relationship and about to really leave home for the first time in my life) I started this blog. Technically, I registered the name years before and started it one other time – but I let the hosting and content expire and disappear from that first foray.
Both attempts at a personal blog were attempts at slowing down. What’s slower than a turtle and a sloth? For me, reading and writing are intentionally slow processes. They are, or can be, forced exercises in processing and understanding. I believe that one of the unspoken and unheralded benefits of teaching a child to read is the patience that reading requires and eventually fosters.
I remember crying from frustration and impatience as I sat at the dining room table with my letter blocks learning phonics (or I’ve been told the story enough times that I’ve created a memory of it). As an adult, the act of writing forces me to process, think, rearrange, and try to build coherence in the sometimes noisy and chaotic chamber between my ears. Written that way, it sounds like I’m crazy… perhaps no more so than anyone else. I know I have a voice inside me – maybe several. I hear it narrating walks. I hear it having arguments in the shower. I hear it planning ways to improve the world. I hear it giving grand speeches and honest apologies. I hear it describing scenes real and imagined. Sometimes he’s a jerk – that’s when I’m most interested in what he has to say. Sometimes I think he’s brilliant, and then I assassinate him and wonder, “now why would I go and cut him off like that?” Most of the time, he’s chatty though inaudible to the outside world. To some degree, this blog has been about giving a little freedom to that voice (or voices), it’s been about finding balance between the world at large and the world inside.
I believe that when we slow down and listen – to others and ourselves – we recognize that we’re all a bit tortured and trapped, lost and simultaneously found. We’re all living in the spaces in between. We have desires that lead to disappointments. We have hopes, dreams, and fears. We have thoughts that bring us happiness and thoughts that bring us shame. We worry. We strive. We succeed and we fail. We try to make sense of the world around us, and if we have the time and patience, we try to make sense of the world inside us. Whitman brilliantly said that he contains multitudes. We all do. No one moment in life defines who we are. Moments are just snapshots – shards of color and shape that create a larger mosaic. The most abhorrent monsters (words that I loath to use in describing another human being) probably have moments of grace. The greatest saints among us probably have moments of disgrace. For me, this past year of writing has been about discipline and practice. It has been about trying to listen, trying to understand, and trying to play – all while trying to get a little more comfortable with the things that make me uncomfortable.
I studied writing in college. By that I mean I was an English major who took six or seven creative writing classes. I started a literary journal that had a very short (2 issues) but mildly successful run (it was reviewed in Library Journal and was just about to get picked up by a national distributor). I sat in coffee shops and read and wrote poetry. I became a book and journals editor and worked with one of the most well-known literary critics in the world. When I was really young, I wanted a desk for Christmas because I had wanted to be a writer (and also a surgeon like the doctors on M.A.S.H.). For most of my life, words have been an undercurrent – sometimes visible, always vibrant. They’ve been a little like a mountain stream that disappears beneath the rocks only to reappear somewhere further down the mountain side: sometimes a trickle, sometimes with a little more force.
A few other themes in my life have been the feeling that I was never quite good enough (who doesn’t feel that way?), an aversion to being the center of attention, a strong desire to see a more just and fair world, a strong sense of self-awareness, a distaste for boastfulness and self-aggrandizement, and a feeling of never quite fitting in which allows me to fit in almost everywhere. For much of my life I’ve lacked passion and rigor and have been easily distracted by curiosity. By that I mean, I like everything in equal measure. When I take personality tests my answers are often between the two and the four on the five point Likert scale. I forever hear, in my father’s voice, you’re not serious enough (about anything and everything). I have simultaneously been trying to outrun that voice and criticism and embrace it as a way of developing my own voice – one that is a little more understanding of who I am and how I am: a bit of a dilettante with an interest in stories, setting, psychology, and imagery. I’m conflict averse. As such, I’m fascinated by conflict. I spend a lot of time trying to understand nuance, and then get sick of complexity and seek out simplicity. I want to put precise language to things. I want to see the whole person, but also admire the way the sunlight flashes as small flecks of orange in their eyes.
I wish I could say that I set out to achieve a particular (and measurable) goal when I started this blog. I was at a point in my life when I felt my voice had been taken away from me. I had been in a relationship in which showing the other person how much I cared for them and thought about them was my primary form of creativity and expression. Absent that person and that outlet, I decided to turn that attention and creativity inward… to try to be for myself what she had been for me. At various times over the past year, I’ve taken this blog down, hidden posts, and re-evaluated purpose. I always return to the same thing – an attempt to discover my authentic self and the multitudes within – so that I might also discover and appreciate the authenticity of others. I’ve played with the concept of varying levels of privacy and disclosure. In my last relationship, I wanted to give everything away and only to this one person. Everything was sacred – which can have the effect of creating an unnatural level of intensity. As a reaction to that intensity, through my writing, I’ve tried to live more freely and share more abundantly. Finding the center requires knowing where the edges are.
As of this writing, there are 230 published posts, 27 drafts, and 192 private posts. I’m proud to have dedicated so much time to words and exploration. At the same time, I’m embarrassed that I’ve done so much navel gazing. A few months ago I hid everything in an attempt to re-read and re-evaluate. The 30 or 40 poems I’ve written this past year will remain hidden – only because I’d like to publish some of them and literary journals consider a blog post as being already published. The other hidden posts I simply haven’t gotten around to re-reading, editing, deleting, or unhiding. I may put things back in hiding, I may add more – the blog is an evolving process with a lot of tiny snapshots.
This past year has been one of the most reflective years in my life. Today I begin year two of TurtleSloth. What once motivated me has changed. I’m in a very different place. I feel like a different person – and yet still the same. This is neither good nor bad, just different. I hope to continue writing. I hope to get better at the craft. I hope to get to a point where it becomes less personal like a diary and more relatable like a good essay. I’m a little afraid of what might happen if I slow down too much. I’ve learned that writing is a lot like exercise – take too much time away from it, and it’s harder to get back in to it. I think in year two, I’ll start keeping a few more things to myself – which means I might not post as often. I suspect that year two will involve learning to balance life a bit better and with more grace. I expect to dedicate myself to whatever job I take up. I’m slowly feeling like I might be ready to give more of myself to someone else – though it’s still difficult to imagine approaching what I once had. I expect to continue to pursue writing in some form or another. But more than anything, I think I’ll live a little more freely, walk a little lighter, and see a little more of the world and the people around me. I never expected a blog to become my best friend… I never expected to become my own best friend… and while I’ve said it a number of times, I’m not sure I was expecting to be the person I wanted to find or find the person I wanted to be.