Walking this long dock into the waterless bay

I have, obviously, not been writing enough. Not here, not in my journal, and not on my computer. The strange thing about this stall is that it is not due to my job. In fact, I am settling into that better than I was a few months ago. Rather, it was the sense of shame that I feel in writing a blog. The shame that I had buried to finally start writing this blog. The shame that was pulled back to the surface by a good friend who too often criticizes others for their leaps into potential embarrassment. After a general criticism of the blog form, this friend told me that a journal is just "a self indulgent echo chamber where true self analysis is impossible." It has taken me a while to bounce back from that, although my indignation was manifest in an immediate email response.

The thing is, almost everything that everyone does is embarrassing. We are all fucking up our lives in small ways, all of the time. And you can't be afraid of that. The worst thing is to be afraid of it--to be too scared to move out of your small space, your small ideas, too scared to flex into whatever comes next. Whatever else I may be, I am unafraid of that. Blogs and journals are imperfect means of examining your own actions, of understanding your world, but they are an attempt. And that is all we can ever do: try to understand ourselves, to understand others, to understand the world around us, and to live in it intentionally and thoughtfully. A journal, for me, is the best way to do this. It is the underlying step of self-examination that leads to actions far from its destroyed pages.

Of course the journal is not the best medium for everyone, and some people think it's a waste of time, that conversation or deep thought without written record is the only way to do this. I'm not here to judge those methods. But I do believe that thinking deeply about an issue, and then writing about it, just for yourself, before you begin posturing or absorbing others' thoughts, is a valid means of understanding the issue as well as yourself. Each person reacts differently to the world, and each of those reactions is influenced by every other person with whom he or she converses, interacts. Before the influence, though, there is a personal, unique response. That is what I record. That is the purpose of a journal. Rooting myself. Understanding who I am before I am pushed and pulled by the world, before I am stretched. And after I am stretched, I will return to the journal, and write whatever I believe about the next issue that strikes me as significant. It is not a vacuum, it is not an echo chamber. It is influenced each day by everything around me, but it retains my own unique pen press of thought.

Self-analysis is possible only in rare moments, and I don't believe that journals provide a more regular occasion for it. I do, however, believe that the ability of a journal-keeper to look back on his or her recorded thoughts of a year ago, five years ago, and analyze the changes through which he or she has gone, the transformation of thought processes, is enormously enhanced by the existence of such a record. For me, it works. Perhaps, for my friend, it does not. But each person has a different route to self-analysis, to comprehension of the world; it is not valuable to undermine another person's route simply because it is not yours.