I don't write on this blog any more. I have my Booknotes blog, my family blog, my teaching and training blog, my NaNoWriMo blog (except that I seem to have given up this year), and my sewing blog, but this is the blog that started it all. I don't write in it any more because it was very confessional and very unfocused. It was about my reactions to everything, and my need to put those reactions into words. But tonight, I'm writing, because it fills a need--and a part of myself that I have tried to keep inside, or suppress, or channel into other places, or mostly to condense into angsty statuses on Facebook. Sometimes I cry a lot, too, but that has become less frequent. I can't catch up here. If you are reading this, you might already know something of my story--grad school, academic job market, regular job market, trying to cope with not being where I wanted to be, trying to cope with the fact that I both desire and scorn academia, and scorn it in part (but not wholly) because I feel the sting of rejection. The coping does not end. The sting is still raw, though it hurts less and becomes more a normal part of life--as grieving does, I guess. And sometimes, I just can't handle it. And so here I am.
I read tonight a beautiful article posted on Tor.com. It is about Neville Longbottom, and how he is the most important character in the Harry Potter series. Simply reading the title, I agreed, and reading the article, I not only agreed--I admired the ease and symmetry with which the author made her case. It was beautiful. Go read it--it will inspire you. And it is just what I think literary criticism should do. It is almost painful to see someone else doing it so very well, when it is exactly what I always wanted to do--to direct people to read in such a way that the literature expands their view of the world. I wanted to do this both in teaching and in criticism, and I now do neither. I could still write, certainly. And I have--on my Booknotes blog. But I don't care so much about hanging out on others' blogs attracting readers. I don't have the time and energy to cultivate a readership--something I never consciously tried to do when I started this blog. At the time, I simply seemed to be saying things that people found intereting. And I was gratified, because they were smart people. And some of those people remain friends, for which I am also grateful.
But the blog took up too much of my life. It consumed my time because everything I say, I want to say at length, and in great detail. In order to graduate, I had to let it go--the blogging lifestyle. Which was, in fact, the only public writing life I have ever enjoyed. I will never recapture that.
My "official" vision of the writing life was the academic writing life. The problems there were that I wanted to say things that were often considered banal and mundane. I had to repackage them so that the veneer was impressive. I could do it. I even enjoyed it. But I became burned out, and feared that I could not write to achieve tenure, though I always thought that I would be able to when the time came. The time never came. So now I can't write academic prose. I can't do literary criticism. Because it is too much effort for too little reward.
When my eyes stray across something I could write--that I should write--it wounds me, because it is ultimately a defeat. It is a self-defeat, and a defeat born of circumstance. Without a context that requires and allows me to write, how can I write? Without an audience, how can I motivate myself to say anything of consequence? My overwhelming sense is that without the job that supports it, what I write is ultimately worthless. If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it... I do not actually think it has the courage to make a sound. I didn't think I could be broken, but I think I have been.
