"Sometimes language itself is a weapon." -- Mary Pipher, or Quoted in the LA Times

When I was posing topless, in my leopard print panties on my friend’s red couch for Arlene Textaqueen's forthcoming deck of playing cards, she asked me to pick a quote from the book I was reading. After a few so-so options, I chose; “Sometimes language itself is a weapon.” (Mary Pipher, Writing to Change the World) Indeed.

I’m really honored to be included in this article by Ed Champion in the L.A. Times called “Blogging: a crash course on introspection.” Do check it out, especially the last bit on Virginia Woolf. Wow! As for my thoughts (and fyi, those were culled from an interview of about an hour and a half), they’re complicated and I’m too tired to properly address all of it, but I know that to some people, writing about your personal life will never make sense. It’s personal, end of story. I’ve always been a writer, a sharer, a connector, and yet I will also acknowledge that as much as I’d like to think I’m writing for and to my close inner circle of friends, as well as people not as close but who I know understand the impulse, I’m in fact writing this blog for anyone who may be reading, whether they stumbled across it or not. I have definitely toned down what I share because it’s so hard to paint a full picture, and because there are plenty of things that are private, they just aren’t necessarily the ones that are private for other people. I’m realizing that there are intimacies that can be captured in fiction, perhaps, better, but I don’t want to use that as a copout. I do believe in the cathartic power of words, and there’s a mystery to it, a way that I don’t always know what will happen if I write any given thing, but only that I feel compelled to. And yet even when I do write about, say, relationships, there are always parts of them that are private, that maybe don’t even exist for the other person. That are mine alone. In the extremely long process of getting over my last relationship, I’ve seen that. Writing helps and helped, certainly, but it can’t do everything. It can’t erase memories or mend a broken heart, and yet often, for me, they are the only thing I have to cling to.

For me, blogging means the freedom to not be constrained by word counts or structure or topic. It’s a very primal “this is my blog and my space to say whatever the fuck I want.” But it’s also a way to encompass so much. There are the links to the professional writing, but also links to who I read, which may give a clue about who I am. For me the most challenging part of all of this, that former life as a sex columnist, this one as a blogger and person trying to figure out what direction her life is going in, is to stay true to myself while being open as well. I think “open” can easily lead to listening to the often uninformed opinions of this person and that person. It can be confusing, but I’m also honored to be part of so many wonderful scenes and groups and communities here that inspire me every single day. To have people I wildly respect and admire welcome me into their circles, whether it’s Crossfit or the comics crowd or lit bloggers or trivia nerds, is vital to me.

This goes back to someone I told someone I care about recently, that’s clawed at my mind ever since. I wrote that “at the end of the day what I or anyone else thinks of you, really doesn't matter compared to what you think of yourself.” The more I thought about that statement, the more I realized that I’d really told a half-truth, both to him and to myself. I need to make a distinction there between the “anyone else” of anonymous strangers, and the “anyone else” of the people who know and care about us. I care desperately, probably way too much, about what those people I referenced above think of me. Not what they think superficially, but that they trust me and know that my heart is in the right place. Not a one-size-fits-all morality per se, but a baseline of empathy of community, of looking outside yourself. I realized it was a lie when my opinion about this person plummeted, even moreso than it already had, when I found out the high esteem I thought he was held in was a façade as well. To me, your friends, your community, who you surround yourself with, say a great deal about who you are. I love meeting new people and bringing them into these various circles. I loved spending last Saturday afternoon chilling and gossiping with Nichelle, because we both care about the same things, from silly news to the deeper things. I'm not trying to say I'm any more complex than anyone else; I think we're all complex, and all simple on some level too. Me, I'm much more PG than I am NSFW, and yet by dint of what I do for a living, most of what you'll stumble across on line is about matters sexual. But talk to me at a party and I'll quiz you about your babies or your workout routine or your creative endeavors. I'll ask you about your bad dates and favorite cupcakes. Sure, Martha and I probably horrified some of the Etsy folks with our sex talk, but I don't think that's a me thing, it's a comfort with the topic, amongst friends. And as much as sometimes I wish I had gone about all of this with a pseudonym, I also don't take any of it too seriously. I don't want to be "Rachel Kramer Bussel" all the time, whoever people think she is. It's not a pen name, but it is, in its way, a persona. Not a deliberate out and out alter ego, but one side of me that comes out best in writing. In person, especially when it comes to sex and dating, I can be aggressive, but I'm more likely to be shy until I know what the other person is thinking. I'm skittish and just as confused as anyone else about all of this.

I guess the conundrum when it comes to blogging or any public writing is that it’s more of the anonymous “anyone else”s who you’re opening yourself up to. Sure, their opinions don’t have the potential to get to me as deeply as people I respect, but I read pretty much everything written about me, and much as I’d like to take a lesson from my friend Jessica Cutler, they stay with me. But the risk is worth it, for the times when the anonymous become part of that circle. I’m excited to attend BlogHer next weekend to meet other people who think about these issues, other women who get that need to confess, but also have more going on than what’s in front of a computer screen.

I’ve mainly given up trying to micromanage what anyone else thinks of me, but am continually buoyed by the people who enter my life and instantly seem like they were there all along. You know who you are (I hope).

And one more thing: the opening graf in Ed’s piece has William H. Gass castigating the autobiographer for "think[ing] of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and of himself as sufficiently skilled at rendering as to render it rightly." I would venture to say that for me it’s the very opposite. It’s in fact the uncertainty about whether any of what I go through is worthwhile, the uncertainty and confusion and doubt and all of those kinds of feelings, that make me need to sort them out in writing. Yes, in some ways, I’m hoping someone somewhere will have something perhaps comforting to say, but that’s too literal. I don’t mean it in a “there, there, everything will be okay sense.” I mean that someone will have gone through exactly what I have, and will let me know you do come out the other side. During the interview, I referenced Caroline Knapp, who I just think had such brilliant insights and quite expertly took her personal details and mapped them onto the larger world of women’s lives. I’ll be posting soon about Mary Pipher’s wonderful book Writing to Change the World, but will say for now that her book inspired me at a time when I’ve been feeling like my writing is worthless, rote, boring, inconsequential. When I’ve been feeling like what I “really want” to do is not what I am doing. But I think Pipher’s concept of “changing the world” works because it’s so expansive. Sometimes, that world is us, sometimes, maybe it just means realizing you can do something you didn’t think you were capable of. I don’t think my erotica is “changing the world,” and I often pooh-pooh that genre to myself; oh, this is easy, silly, vapid. Erotic, but what else is it? And I was reading this gay male story I wrote called “Live From New York,” which is the first story in Richard Labonte’s forthcoming anthology Where the Boys Are, and realized that what else it is is evocative, arousing, insightful. And that if I don’t feel there’s an “else” to my writing, it’s not any genre or style’s fault, but mine. I need to put that “else” in there, to make it happen, to draw it out of myself. And that when I can do that, I’m at peace in a way that only writing can bring. And I guess that’s the kind of “introspection,” however long-winded it may be, that this blog, at least, is for.