Keep Your Eyes On Your Own Work

It is the 14th of January, which means that it has been 20 days since I wrote a regular blog entry here (by which I mean one that is in paragraphs and is non-Schmoetry/Phoneography/Five Star Friday/Canadian Weblog Awards). I think this may be the longest I have gone in the nine years, four months, and 20 days that I've been at this blogging gig.



Something in me froze up at Christmas. I'm searching. I don't know where to put my feet next.

You see, this year I plan on revamping my whole online deal, because it's grown over all this time, and it's developed appendages, and it's starting to feel a little like the hair on Medusa's head. My house has grown cluttered and makeshift.



So, while I let plans percolate in the back of my mind, I decided to take on publishing one poem every day during 2013, and this has started pulling some pretty deep chords within me already, 13 poems in. It has made me take a second look at how I tell my stories and why I tell them, and it has made me listen to the changing tenor of my voice as my writing and online real estate grow into something else again. It's also making me look at how all of you tell your stories and why you tell them, and it has made me listen to your changing tenor as we all move in this medium together.

It's very distracting, and so outside my specific time-sensitive projects, I have been quiet here. I'm a bit of a publishing maniac, so you may not have noticed my lack of paragraph writing, but I really have been quieter.



While I've been quieter, I've been thinking about:

• blogging and the deep sexism that often runs behind confessional writing, and
• how marketers still struggle to define women by their relationship to children even when those women don't have them (I'm looking at you, PANK), which just shows again how people still don't know how to value women as individuals with their own merit the way they do men, and
• how so many people decry the state of blogging as having gone down the marketing toilet, destroying authenticity and the power in not selling stuff, but how that is a myopic and cherry-picked opinion not based on the thousands of examples of bloggers who aren't selling stuff or who are but who aren't spam-sleazy about it, and
• how some online blogging critics more often than not conflate criticism with conjecture and insult, and, while criticism within the medium is important, it is equally important that that criticism move beyond sophomoric snark, and
• how I need to find my way through all the arguments I have up in my head so I can find constructive pursuits guided by love to put out there with my hands.

One of my guiding statements this year is this:

Keep your eyes on your own work.

Constantly altering measurement of the joy in my own pursuit with perceptions of how others are doing it better or less well than me means that I also alter my perception of my own work based on either how I am failing measured against someone whose work is not what I do or against how others are failing based on what I think they should be doing.

How about we all do something that makes more sense? Like make stuff we believe in? Yes?



NUMBER ONE RULE FOR HOW TO KNOW YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG:

If you are more obsessed with how other people are failing or judging you for failure than you are with improving your own work, you need to recalibrate your priorities.



So, this entry has been a rather meandering and disjointed journey, but it means this: I'm figuring my stories out, I'm working to understand what words should go where and why, and I'm learning how to centre it through the force of love.

And it feels damn good to write even a disjointed mess after 20 days without paragraphs. Goddamn.

I've Been Blogging For Nine Years Today, and It's Mostly Your Fault

Would you believe that this weblog is NINE YEARS OLD today? Because it is! To celebrate, here is a picture of me inside the number nine giving you the crazy eyes.



I had no idea when I started blogging, under the Palinode's influence, that it would be anything other than an online version of letters to friends I hadn't yet met, so when I hit publish on my first blog entry — it was, bizarrely, an essay about why it's a bad idea to swallow your own tongue — I went about my life as though nothing remarkable had happened.

I look back at blogger-me of 2003, and I feel like patting her on the head like she's a goofy, drooling puppy with oversized feet that keep stepping on her own ears, because DAMN I was so cute not knowing all the stuff I didn't know.

For instance, I didn't know that:

• I would become a writer who would read her words to hundreds of people in a ballroom in San Francisco.
• I would be invited to speak on numerous panels at both BlogHer and Blissdom Canada conferences.
• I would wind up in the Globe & Mail and on CBC Radio and in Woman's Day and on CBC News and in Best Health.
• I would become a phoneographer who would travel to conferences to talk about iPhoneography, be a part of a worldwide iPhoneography exhibition, and be a contributor to a book about the craft.
• I would get to write with so many great people at BlogHer, MamaPop, Aiming Low, and Girl Body Pride.
• I would start my very own little community called Grace in Small Things based around the simple idea of gratitude.
• I would work to champion better blogging at Five Star Friday and the Canadian Weblog Awards.
• I would eventually quit my office job so I could start a full-time career under an umbrella I would call Ninjamatics.
• I would join up with a phenomenal board of directors in service of the fantastic non-profit Violence UnSilenced.
• I would team up with Laurie and Neil to create a monthly Twitter chat about the state of blogging that would take us all the way to New York to lead a panel discussion at a BlogHer conference.
• I would take to public speaking the way I did when I took the stage at TEDxRegina to talk about self doubt and the power of personal narrative:
  
• This blogging community would grow from my handful of virtual penpals into such a powerful webwork of human beings that were able to help me grow the confidence it took to deal with cancer, quit smoking, face my alcoholism, and work through bouts of anxiety and depression.

I don't know if you are truly aware of the power that you all have together, but this community, beginning with the Palinode, has given me my life.

This is not hyperbole. Look at that list up there of all the things that have come to pass in my life because of all of us hanging out here together in the ether we call the Internet. Sure, it hasn't all been wine and song here. I was invited to die in a pool of blood once by an extra thoughtful commenter, and there was that guy who expressed displeasure that my site did not live up to the dirtiness my name implied and suggested I send him just a little something to make up for it. The creeps and assholes, though — true stalkers and violent/sexual offenders aside — are just the colour that spice up this little constellation we've built together.

The path of my entire life has been altered and moulded here, and I cannot find the words to impress upon you the magnitude of this. My entire life is another thing now because of this place.

My father, a man who barely understands how to open an email let alone play solitaire on a computer, turned to me a month or so ago and said The internet has been good for you, hasn't it? It's changed you. It's good to see you happy and doing things you love to do. He doesn't really understand what I do here, but he see its effects on me. I answered by telling him about all of you.

It's you I want to thank for these nine years. You left comments, you wrote emails, you told me I could do it when I thought I couldn't, you told me to rest when I was tired, you told me to get off my ass when I was being an ass, you hired me, you loved me, you passed me tissues at conferences, you set me straight when I went too far, and you lured me out when I didn't go far enough.

Thank you all for these nine years. You — yes, even you who is just itching to tell me which grammar rule I've broken this time — are why I will be here for nine more.

Thank you.

BlogHer, Voices Of The Year, and How My Switch Was Flipped

Four years ago, I stood in front of a group of BlogHer '08 attendees in a ballroom in San Francisco and took part in the conference's first Community Keynote before it became better known as Voices Of The Year. I faced the largest group of people I had ever faced, I think there were 800 of them, and I read them a blog entry I wrote just a year before that expressed the deep fear I had had about my cancer and subsequent hysterectomy.



When I stood up on that stage and read my piece, a cliched switch was metaphorically flipped. Something inside me turned over. Something inside me said I have people now and I am meant to be here and I have more to do and say in this community than anywhere else I have ever been.

And then I went home and had a nervous breakdown.

I went to the doctor and held my head to stop myself from shaking it no, no, no at the floor and the walls and my own sad life as I asked him to fill in a form for medical leave from my abusive job, because I had found out that I had that Something Big inside me that I'd always suspected was there but had not had the opportunity to realize until I'd faced that sea of people in San Francisco.

I wish there were simple words to explain how reading about my cancer up on that stage in that ballroom in California made me lose my mind and eventually quit my job, quit smoking, quit drinking, somehow find my personal, spiritual, and professional footing, and then later find myself here working full time from home as a writer and designer who is invited to speak to bloggers about what they do. There aren't simple words, though. I had a switch that needed just the right confluence of events to flip, and BlogHer's Voices Of The Year baby somehow flipped it and, in turn, my entire life.



I stood on that stage swelled with the feeling of I-have-arrivedness, which is not to say that I felt famous, although I kind of did a little bit, but which is to say that I felt that I really had my feet planted in a place that I was meant to be and was doing what I was meant to do for the time in my whole 35 years.

Later today at 4:45 p.m., the fifth BlogHer Voices Of The Year will begin, and I will be firmly planted in that audience cheering each nervous blogger on as they read their respective pieces. I will get to watch them claim their physical place in what is normally only a virtual space, and I will get to remember what that meant for my life in 2008 and what this might mean for some of them in smaller and larger ways.

This is my church, an expression of my greater drive, in a way, when I watch a new group of bloggers step to the mic one by one to clear their throats and begin out loud, in their own words.

Thank you, Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and BlogHer staff past and present for bringing all of us, and me, here again. You gave a once fledgling, now thriving, community a space to claim, and we do.

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PS. I am an honoree in this year's Voices Of The Year for my piece We Can Become Known.