This Dead Blog Makes Me Sad, or This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things

When I was eleven, I had a teacher, one Mrs. Wilkinson, who had everyone in our seventh-grade English class keep a journal, which she would collect periodically, just to ensure that everyone was really putting effort into the assignment. She set aside class time for writing, although we were encouraged to write avidly outside of class, as well. I'd kept diaries on and off for a few years prior to that, but nothing as well-maintained as the project I was about to begin. I took it seriously.

I bought my first journal at a stationery store in Vienna, a few steps away from one of the tram stops between Grinzing and Schottentor on the #38 tram. The first book had a chartreuse paisley cover and, like all of its successors, was hardbound. Because I wasn't yet aware how much and how frequently I'd be writing, or that I'd be pressing everything from photographs to flowers between the pages, the first journal had a small, stiff spine. I took it everywhere with me. Writing became a solid part of my routine. I wrote when I woke up in the morning; I wrote during lunch at school; I wrote, elbow to elbow on dining-room tables, with my best friends; I wrote in bed, by flashlight; I wrote on field trips--in Graz, Salzburg, Hallstadt, and in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. I doodled, sketched, and painted in it, taped ticket stubs, postcards, cut-out snowflakes, bits of sheet music, candy wrappers, stickers, and friendship bracelets inside. When I ran out of pages, I'd go to the stationery store and buy another journal. Our class visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; I wrote about that. My mother got sick and returned to the United States to get on the national transplant registry; I wrote about that, too. I documented the piercing of my ears, the euthanizing of our oldest family pet, my first experience skiing, the effects of war in Sarajevo, my debut as a clarinet soloist in a youth music festival, the harvesting of wine grapes with Cobenzl vineyard workers. I wrote (and meticulously taped construction-paper flaps over) awful poetry, first-kiss fantasies, lamentations on the subject of puberty, weird dreams, made-up stories, and racy passages copied from romance novels. I described the night my father and I drove on roads lining the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, on a night so bright he turned the headlights off and navigated by moonlight alone. I described the night it was first suggested to me that he wasn't coming home. I described a few things that happen to you once in life and then never again.

I had about ten years' worth of writing, some eleven volumes, when I destroyed the entire collection.

I had a roundabout way of doing it. I fell in love, packed the journals in a big box, drove 900 miles across the country, and left them in my beloved's bedroom closet. I was nineteen. I thought I was coming back. I thought giving him my single most precious and irreplaceable possession would guarantee my return at a time when few things were certain. Here's why it's my fault: I never told him what the box contained and--either out of respect of my privacy or a complete lack of curiosity--he never looked inside it. We fell out of touch while the box was shuffled around among his things, deposited in a flood-prone basement, and then finally discarded by a disgruntled landlord, along with a smattering of other abandoned belongings.

Among friends, I've referred to the self-sabotaging tendency by which I lose or destroy the things I love best as my dispersionism. I am a dispersionist. My journals were the greatest thing I have ever made and lost. And while I'm wise to the fact that their loss lends them a vaster greatness, it is nevertheless true that words are stronger than memories, and that I greedily regret not having more of both.

It's been about five years to the day I had the brief conversation--long distance, over the phone--about the fate of my journals. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was better this way; that the writing was probably all leg hair and slow dances anyway; that Past Me and Past Life were not as compelling as I'd like to believe; that it's silly and self-indulgent to be so backward-looking all the time; that it is far better to have nothing so dear to lose, no more paper to hoard and haul around, et cetera. And yet, within the last couple of years, I could still catch myself entertaining the deluded fantasy that my friend had actually held on to the box and was hoping to surprise me at some point with an unexpected reunion, or that there exists somewhere some landlord or dump-worker who thought, "Who could possibly throw this away? It must be important to someone. I'll hold on to it for a little while." (Even to describe the "chartreuse paisley cover" is a nod to the latter.) These are, of course, effects of denial--an inability to accept, or even grasp, the scope and permanence of the lack (together with, I admit, a splash of self-importance). Every now and then, I'll tell some half-remembered story, and someone might say, "You oughta write a book!" and I'll flinch to think of the resources I no longer have. It was the first loss of my adult life, the first for which I was solely accountable, and one which seemed to reiterate and worsen all preceding losses (the act of documentation itself being more often than not a futile attempt to salvage and recreate, in my case). I'm still sore about it today.

In time, though, the constellation of responses to something like this--the disbelief, denial, delusions, even disappointment--are superseded by acceptance. There is the sad old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so it is that I labor to convince myself that it is not the writing itself that mattered, but the fact of having written. The simple fact that "it was" is greater than whether it was actually good or bad, useful or not.

I've written, albeit ambivalently, about the writing cure--here, too, the process is of greater significance than the product. It is somewhat comforting to know that I can't obliterate the effect of all that work as easily as I did the work itself. Writing is--among other things--a craft. Aspiring writers are often advised to write every day, because improvement is a matter of practice. Maybe I'm a better writer now than I would have been if I hadn't poured so much energy into those journals. Maybe I'm a healthier, better-adjusted person than I would've otherwise been. I certainly have pretty penmanship. Consolation prizes, all!

The moral of this story brings me, finally, to the point of this post. When I started this blog, I looked at it as both an impetus and an opportunity to broaden my research and writing habits. I have interests that are not directly related to my job or creative endeavors, and I figured that keeping a blog would provide both an outlet for those interests and motivation for me to put time into, say, reading a pile of studies about the effectiveness of SSRIs versus behavioral therapy with regard to treatment for mild to moderate depression. I wanted to blog about research, about ideas. I wanted to avoid personal pronouns and navel-gazing. The unfortunate truth is that it takes me much, much longer to research, draft, edit, and publish posts about studies and ideas outside my realm of expertise than it would to just write about what I think. The other unfortunate truth is that it's much, much harder for me to consider an avalanche of personal thoughts and experiences as interesting or valuable as reportage and analysis.I try to remind myself that merely having done is more significant than having done well, or even poorly. I'd rather keep a regular blog than not, even a bad one. Really! I loathe being responsible for yet another piece of internet detritus.

My life now is different from what I imagined it would be about eight months ago. If I don't have time for the kinds of posts I was originally planning on writing, I certainly won't have time for them later. Still, I'd prefer to fill this space somehow. There is also the fact that, all things considered, the next year or so offers a bounty of newness that I want to document and share. I've been where I am now for longer than I've ever been anywhere. And I'm leaving. Cat and I are heading across the country. I'll be trying my hand at a super-selective, fancy-pants MFA program. I'll be teaching for the first time. I'll be in the company of writers I've admired for years. It could be wonderful; it could be a complete disaster; it could be variable amounts of both. But it'll be worth writing, I think, and the people who stop by here most often (hello, my friends!) might consider it worth reading.

I'm going to try to post here once a week. Topics may range from perspectives on solitude to the effects of consuming an entire pot of Earl Grey tea (biochemically no different from a tablespoon of ipecac, in case you're wondering). They may be 1,200 words long, or 12 words long, or may just be YouTube videos of toads bouncing down mountains. It doesn't matter. I'm doing it. Weekly. Promise. (In part because it's not easy to pack the internet into a cardboard box and accidentally the whole thing.) It could be bad, it could be good, but most importantly, it will be.

So, cheers to all that. And thank you, Mrs. Wilkinson.