Authenticity

I have blogged or journaled online for over ten years. Over ten years. I was thirteen when I started doing this ritual of which I am partaking now.  Blogging is one of those things that I've done for so long that I have great difficulty imagining not doing it.  I guess you could say it's part of my identity, or at very least a reflection of my identity.  My blog is public, exceedingly personal, and leaves me extremely vulnerable.

The question I've grappled with since coming of age is the vulnerability worth it?

Things were different when I started out.  One, this was when home Internet use was a relatively new thing to be doing. Not everyone had a computer and a connection...  The thin veil of privacy that the internet provided was thicker then... You could express yourself without much worry that your mom or teachers or whoever else it might have been that you didn't like knowing your innerworkings were going to find you.

Or at least, that's how it was for me.

Sometimes I read my old archives and just marvel at how naive and young I was once... How incredibly narcissistic I was at fourteen... and how the things I worried about and complained about now seem so inconsequential, and how there's so much of that part of my life that I really don't recall with very much detail. Other times I read things I've written and am struck about how much I really haven't changed.

I still have the longing to be be understood. To be heard. To be desired.

I look back and think, "Dear god! I was a walking teenage angst tragedy!" but at the same time, there was an openness... an authenticity... to the things I wrote back then. Most of it trite. Most of it sprinkled with the word fuck a few too many times.... but back then I had a voice to say exactly what I thought without being afraid that someone was going to think I was stupid, or petty, or narcissistic, or whatever else you'd think of an angst ridden teenage girl.

Somewhere along the line, I traded in my nerve for something to hide.

I spent the latter part of my teenage years with my nose in a Bible while simultaneously fucking any boy goodly enough to say yes because being sexually active and seemingly straight would throw everyone off to the reality that I'm not, which at the time, was the cardinal sin to be hiding. Being a slut might get you minorly ostracized, but being not straight? Might as well send you to the gallows.

I tried to be authentic through it all. The blogs I read at the time all seemed to say that the way to save the church was to be an authentic person, to not pretend your pious and be willing to admit your transgressions.... A sense of we're all in this thing together and maybe somehow we'll all be transformed by grace. Even now the sentiment is heartwarming, but reality tended to echo of an Ani Difranco song proclaiming "Imagine you're a girl, trying to finally come clean, knowing full well they prefer you were dirty and smiling."

Being told you need psychological help because you have a blog and you've professed to be Christian and done some rather unchristian things isn't exactly a confidence builder...

Today, blogging is hard. I throw away much of what I start because it's too candid. Too raw. Do I really want everyone to know this? I plot and scheme ways to not bring attention to my blog for some people and then try to figure out ways how I can get others who I'd like to know me to read it. And I squirm uncomfortably about what people might think. What people might say, and if I'm prepared to deal with any criticism that may come. There's much that hasn't been said because of the lack of energy to deal with possible fallout.

But today? My inner thirteen year old would like to tell you, the hell with all of it. I am who I am, and you can fucking deal with it.