Original Photo by Hc_07
Hello again everyone,
I am really excited to announce that, once again, I have decided to make writing a larger part of my life. This is something that I have been thinking about for some time now, but I just hadn’t worked up the courage to do so. And when I say courage, I mean courage. You see, I think the issue was just some combination of fear, anxiety, and stage fright that held me back from creating the material I wished to create. (What? Those are the same thing? Darn.) That’s right, what a lot of my avoidance to writing (and creating in general) comes down to is fear.
I mean, I am not really afraid of what people will say about my work. After all, everyone has the right to like or dislike my opinion all they want, and I am completely fine with most of the ways that people express this like or dislike. So, if it isn’t that, just what am I afraid of?
Well, for the most part, the biggest things that I am afraid of in the process of creating content for the world are 1) that people could misrepresent my work or 2) that I might change my mind at some indeterminate point in the future.
For the first of these, I think that the issue is really quite simple. The work that I create, I create within a certain context. It is extremely meaningful to me, and I set out for my words to mean one, clear, poignant thing. However, when you, the reader, are reading this, you are not sitting in the contextual bubble in which it was created. This means that what I thought was a clear, meaningful commentary could be completely lost on you, or, worse, it could mean something entirely different! This makes me nervous at the best of times, but when I am writing opinions that challenge some of the main tenets of society, this nervousness turns to fear, or even terror.
Somewhat related to this is my fear that I might change my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that I am a fallible human being and that I grow over time. But there is something about the permanence of the internet that scares the bejeebers out of me. I am constantly paranoid that one day I am going to go back over the work that I have created and think “What the hell was I doing?”
So, with all of that, how can I claim that I am going to continue writing here? Well, you see… I can’t, and I don’t want to make any promises of that sort. However, I do want to acknowledge my fear and acknowledge that I am wanting to try in spite of it. And also, I want to make my motivations and my plans clear; not just for the readers of this, but for myself.
This coming fall, I will be attending graduate school. I will be taking class with people set to become accomplished academics and theorists. I will be pushed to write, write, and write. And in all of that, I want this place, this blog, to be my space, my draft board, and my jewel of subversion. I seek to make available here, not only my thoughts and opinions, but also the work that I complete, the works that I seek to publish in journals and conferences. I seek to distribute the work that I do to whoever wants to read it or (more likely) whoever happens to stumble across it.
So, today, I am claiming this space again as my own, and making the plans to use it to accomplish my goals. And hopefully, one day, all that fear that I mentioned above will just be an after thought as I publish my thoughts for the world to see.
The Post-Modernist Slut 