It’s time for a renaissance. This part of me has gone neglected far too long, but I have reasons. I burned out, a meteoric rise and fall to earth, and I have taken my sweet time in trying to find my way back to some space of ambition and idealism once more. Depression is no simple thing. But I am in love and I have found other people in my life who could love me, too, and I have concrete goals and plans for the first time in four years, and though this is something I have thought, many times, that I should do, I am finally somewhere where, yes, I think that I really can do it again.
But it won’t be quite the same.
I have spent the past six months loving, growing, learning, talking, making connections. I have been creating, writing, painting, and concocting plans for my (our) future. I have engaged in everyday action and activism and have been planning to do so much more. I have not left the feminist blogosphere at all, spending lazy Saturday mornings naked in my lover’s bed perusing my RSS feeds while he dozes beside me, and so often the women I have connected with through blogging and those I do not know personally but follow religiously, inspire me to outrage and elation…and yet, I have felt too burdened by life and all its complications to write. This will change.
I am going to approach this differently, though, than I have before. I am a creative writer. I am a poet. I am an artist. But I am not and have never had pretensions of being a journalist. This is a problem in a political community where readers expect facts and figures and objective truth. I am not objective. I have never pretended to be. I have never been interested in sparking debate or even stimulating discussion. All I have wanted to do was to make people think about things differently. Not to talk or argue with me. To think about what I have said and agree or disagree. I am not interested in proving anyone wrong or being proven wrong, because I think there is room enough in this world for disagreement and that it is perfectly all right for people to have different perspectives from their respective vantage points.
What I want is to let my writing and my art speak for itself. I am not interested in defending myself from personal attacks, in that they do not largely bother me enough for me to feel they are worth addressing. I am not interested so much in defending my ideas, not because I want to ignore criticism but because they are my ideas, not my identity, and they are fluid and often shift. I want to impact the shared discourse. I want to demolish frameworks and alter the world as we see it, but not to propose solutions because I don’t pretend to know better than anyone else what is best for anyone but myself.
I do not and have never worked in things which can be qualified, quantified, proven. Not everything has to be concrete. Not everything has to be objectively true. (And objectivity is an illusion, anyway.) I am an artist and I experiment in thought. The mind is my canvas. Ideas are my medium. But I am not a scientist, a sociologist, and economist, a journalist. I might be called a philosopher, if an examination of my own internal mechanisms can be termed “philosophy”. Because that is all that this blog is or ever has been.
I have been lost and disoriented, trying to make this personal exploration into something more. I have tried to be too many things for too many people. It is not that I dislike writing critical, persuasive essays. It is not that I do not want to engage with others. It is not that I do not want to have a space to post interesting articles. But it can’t be just that. That can’t be all. That can’t be what is at the heart of all this. I had abandoned this project in favor of more creative pursuits. This project must be and will be more creatively-driven from now on in order for me to maintain interest in its growth and evolution.
That does not mean I will post fiction. But what I write will be art. It will be true, it will be flawed, it will be subjective, it will be beautiful and sometimes terrifying, it will be nonfiction and autobiographical, and it will be poetry.
I don’t know if there is a place in the political blogosphere for these ambitions. I don’t know if there is a niche that I can fill. Obviously, I had found one before. But I am going to try, and I hope that you are all willing to join me in this experiment, to hold on tight and see where my musings take us… I have things in store I hope you will enjoy. Some things will be the same. But the focus will be radically different.
This is Definition version 2.0. Enjoy the ride.
