Ch. 1: The Embarrassment That is Blogging

My seeminly bottom-less pit of insecurity and self-doubt clouds my introduction to a writing medium that would become my most favorite thing ever.

Original photo (without my pithy addendum) by Millo Lin

The first time I ever saw a blog had to be in the early aughts. (It has come to my attention the youngers don’t know what that means — [speaking loudly and slowly] THAT'S THE EARLY 2000’S — so somewhere between 2001-2003 for the purposes of this blog).

•• A coworker of mine for whom I had no respect was writing something on a screen with black rectangles and red font. Typical. I asked what is was and he replied that he was blogging (bl-ogging?? Twat did you say??) and offered a brief explanation of it. At the time, I was a geopolitical analyst (sounds fancier than it is) in Austin, a Republican, a smoker, and a frequenter of dive bars who drank pitchers of Lonestar Light WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT.

The thought of publishing your thoughts FOR ANYBODY to see without getting paid to do it was baffling because money legitimizes everything. There was no ROI, so it made zero sense and was immediately disregarded.

Still. The chutzpa! The audacity. To think stupid, random strangers would want to read your stupid, random thoughts in short paragraph form… I mean just WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, JACK?! I’m sure I forgot about it less than ten minutes later, probably intent on finding out which bar the crew planned to descend on after work and hoping it would be one that serves food. I swear to god if I have to go to Opal Divine’s one more time and hear about their scotch selection or how much Andrea loves her IPA’s… but they do have fantastic deep-fried mushrooms…

As I heard more about blogging, I couldn’t get my head wrapped around it. What’s the get? What’s the angle? It seemed to require a connection to self, a sense of inherent worth without the requisite admiration or praise of another, external source. That shit was as foreign to me as public nudity in a Finnish hothouse. It’s one thing to write for established media and publications, or try your luck at penning a book for publication.

— But purposeless drivel emanating from a… a… civilian normie weirdo…  for consumption by the public at large on the internets for no other reason than you want to? Because it feels good? Egoic masterbation?? WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE, PEOPLE?!

**I would like to point out at this juncture that I have since been to therapy and have recently returned.

Little by little, blogs began to enter cultural awareness, lexicon, and value as programs like Blogger popped up to host people’s endless inner dialogue word vomit. Amateur writers jumped on the bandwagon in droves, desperately gleeful in the act of sharing their private lives and thoughts freely for anyone who might have the slightest passing interest or just wanted to waste time at work looking intensely busy in front of their computer screens.

I AM SOOOOO EMBARRASSED FOR THESE... BLOGGERS, I thought, clearly projecting my own black hole of traumatic childhood-induced self-loathing and insecurity on to people for whom I was increasingly, subconsciously nursing rabid jealousy… my precious.

An old college acquaintance started a blog of her life as a stay-at-home-mom(OMG) of a couple of kids back in Houston after college. After earning A DEGREE. IN COLLEGE. She used to be so fun and had so much potential! I would come to find out there was an actual term for these types of annals: mommyblog.

PATHETIC.

And you guys! The mommyblogs were… popular. They were popular. As in… a lot of people liked them. I don’t know what’s going on around here and I don’t like it. Clearly, I didn't know the phrase "internal misogyny" at the time.

I was a serious POLITICAL ANALYST, people! My writing resulted in international changes in leadership! (So that happened one time) I helped cover and forecast the Iraq War, followed liquified natural gas production, and monitored territory grabs in the South China Sea among so many other, very important world events. Do you get me??? Professional! Respectable! Legitimate writing for legitimate people!

It seemed so strange to write about your personal life(!) **in earnest**. Regular people. Unaccomplished, unnoted, people of no public consequence. Who does that??

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Photo by Lisa Yount of one of my family members.

So, listen. My people are from South Louisiana — white, Republican, Christian (including Mormons — very interesting!), patriarchal, etc. The whole nine. With a strong Cajun thread, we are naturally hilarious and make fun of each other relentlessly to shame and pressure one another into adhering to our toxic familial norms. Fun! We love to laugh and to ignore our issues, our elders feeding us a constant diet of

• The South actually won The War

• Might Makes Right

• We’re not racist but also we say the most racist shit you’ve ever heard but that doesn’t mean we’re racist

• And lo, so, so much more.

I knew allllll those people could read anything I posted, and felt the weight of their potential condemnation before even entertaining the notion of a blog with Personal Thought Reportage. (This will have an unusual twist in the later chapters of this telling.)

My early conditioning left my ability to explore my own interests and curiosities  — without them having been pre-determined as valid — completely anemic. This was a muscle I did not have, nor tool in my toolkit. If it didn’t earn me oooohs and aahhhhs from my fam and friends, high school teachers and former nemeses, I wanted nothing to do with it.

But damn if there wasn’t something alluring about the whole enterprise of blogging — the rebellious nature of the act, the PROCLAIMING YOURSELF ON THE WORLD STAGE, the sheer, delectable self-indulgence of it — that hovered at the far end of my ether. There, but not there. Refusing my insistence on ignoring it, like a potential lover I knew would DO ME NO GOOD(!); just a temporary sin of pleasure under the threat of prolonged disrepute and subsequent punishment.

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Alas… the palate had been whetted. Curiosity piqued. Intrigued, I slowly began to turn my attention to those engaging in this newfangled form of self-expression.

Chapter 2 coming soon!