3 notes &
I don’t know anything, I swear.
It’s been a year.
My return to public blogging? Hardly. But, as with anything, forming a habit takes time and some sort of effort, and so, I pick up the keyboard again hoping that something interesting will come pouring out of it.
(This will not be that post. Sorry to those of you who were hoping for a miracle but in the interim, I have lost my ability to write the way I used to.)
I don’t know what I was trying to say a year or two years ago, when I opened this thing. I don’t know what I was trying to say when I opened up a Tumblr account, or a Twitter account, or a Livejournal, either. I don’t know what I’m trying to say now. I am online all the time, practically, when I’m at work, because the kind of work I do (social business communications) sort of demands it; if I’m not looking at competitors, I’m looking at best practices, I’m trying out tools, I’m checking on client work, I’m answering emails, drafting documents, whatever. It’s all about the power of the real-time Web, and I gotta tell you, after watching the world lay itself out online, for good or for ill, for over ten years now, and having to try and wrangle everything I know and everything I feel about it into exceptional client strategies, the very last thing I want to do is put one more iota of myself upon it. My heart isn’t content for people to consume.
The personal is indistinguishable from the professional, to many, and I simply lost my ability to explain myself or try to keep the two separate so I disconnected from it, ever so slowly. Odd, for someone who was on the bleeding edge of blogging (I started one in 1998) and lived it for YEARS, with no monetary gain, no impressions generated, partnership deals, BlogHer Ads, conference attendance, or ignition of Social Media Fails. I didn’t make a dime, I made a few friends, and I made a lot of enemies. After a while, I could no longer afford, emotionally, to tend to it as I once had, and so submerged, hoping that nobody would notice my absence.
It worked. Nobody has.
Steve Rubel talks about the Attention Crash and for at least the last year, the public Note on my MS Office Messenger has been, “I *am* the attention crash.”
What have I done in the last two years? I worked. A lot. I worked so much I didn’t date. Then, I stopped working so much, and I tried to date, and that didn’t go very well. I fell for someone who abused me so quickly, and so terribly, I still can’t find the language to talk about it. But then I put aside some time and I met someone, and he met me, and oh, boy, has that ever been a trip. It’s weird to have a human priority in my life. I hadn’t had one in ten years, I mean, not like that, not a priority that did me the same favor. I let go of my notions of family, finally. I realized that I have a family that loves me and makes me better and values me, and blood has nothing to do with it. I lost a cat. I have a new roommate. I gained sixty pounds, and lost ten of them. I went blonde. I read a few books; more in ‘10 than I did in ‘08 or ‘09.
Mostly, I’ve been trying to put myself back together in a world that’s completely fallen apart. And I think that’s where the problem lies, or the key insight, as they say in the marketing biz. This world, the one I once lived online, is no longer as cohesive as it was when I left it. And in that time, I have changed, too.
I don’t know what I’d write about anymore, in this space or anywhere else. I am out of practice, and if the last three years watching the real-time Web unfold have taught me anything, is that very few of us have anything of any value to say, and I include myself in that. I have become completely convinced that whatever I’d put here has no value at all and my resentment of people who assume that theirs does makes me want to slam doors and throw things. I don’t know what compels me to even try it again. Perhaps going into this with an attitude of, “I’m writing this for the people I love, so maybe they’ll understand what goes on in my head a little better” is the only way through that.
Yeah, this is public, anyone can read it, I’m sick of filtering and password-protecting and ratcheting down everything so some nutbag can’t get near me. I did it, got the t-shirt, and my personal life is totally off-limits now, and I like it that way, and it’s going to stay that way. I’m using this because a lot of my friends don’t care much for Facebook, so whatever. If you’re going to go through my entire social-media footprint, scouring for little bits of evidence that prove to you what a rotten person I am, fine. I don’t care. I’m not here for you. If I’m just content for you to consume, well, you get out of it what you put into it. Here, I’ll lay out what you guys want to know so you don’t have to come back: yeah, I got fat. I have another tattoo and my hair is still blonde and the blonde is STAYING so if you don’t like it go kick rocks or something. Yeah, I met someone awesome. Yeah, we’ve had some death up in these parts and the disease isn’t far behind. I’m still at Edelman and I like it here, as frustrating as it sometimes is around here. I’m not going to tell you where my love goes. I’m not going to tell you how I feel. I’m not going to bother you with hoping you like me; I know who my friends are, and they make themselves known to me.
