About a week out from the vernal equinox. It has consternated me this year both with how hard I got hammered by the seasonal depression and equally how hard I feel I have snapped back, elastic-like, now the light is back. Despite work taking a stressful left turn for a few weeks I have been: continuing on with both podcasting and swimming once a week; initiating my once-a-week bike commute into the office; folding in some additional morning calisthenics three days a week; planning ahead more on meals and grocery juggling; dealing with general adulting a lot better. I almost feel like a functional human being.
But all that is just sort of a prologue to what I was thinking about and why I prioritised blogging today instead of kicking off with the season 1 episode 10 podcast editing. I have been keen to get back to writing again, but due to aforementioned work events, have just been feeling too short on spoons to actually get a post drafted anywhere outside of my own head. So consider this the awkward transition into the blog post I started to write in my brain earlier this morning.
Like many folks in my demographic niche (college educated, mid-forties, crunchy granola US west coastie, upper middle class) I had a copy of The Indigo Girls album Rites of Passage in my stack o’ CDs (and probably still do, somewhere in a box in the attic). My favourite song on that album is Galileo due to my nerdish love of that historical figure, astronomy, science, and the Renaissance; not so much on the reincarnation front. A close second, however, is Virginia Woolf, about whom I know a lot less, but the lyrics in their central message call out to me much more than the specifics of the person.
So I know I’m all right
Life will come and life will go
Still I feel it’s all right
Cause I just got a letter to my soul
And when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughs in my face
You say “each life has its place”
Even in my early twenties, this was one of those thoughts that hit me like a physical blow. I was a bookish kid and written words were how I reached out and made connections to others. It was much harder face to face, I just couldn’t connect because there was so much to overwhelm me and worry about. Was I being a complete idiot? Did I say that right? Did I accidentally spit everywhere? Did I laugh at the wrong time? Wait, I was so busy worrying that I forgot to actually listen to what was said. Quick — smile and nod and make an awkward laugh. It was just exhausting.
But reading someone else’s words, oh. That’s quite all right. As I read I have always had a mental voiceover narrating to me. I often feel like the characters or narrator on the page is talking right to me, maybe because one of the primary tools I used to learn to read involved books on tape that I could follow along with the physical book. My imagination brought me into that person’s circumstances and thoughts so that I didn’t feel as isolated or alone. We don’t need telepathy or time travel as long as we have words.
I have been excited to see a resurgence of blogging of a more personal nature; there was a pretty long dry spell where my feed reader was mostly full of Boing Boing and Serious Eats posts because no one else was really updating anything. I’ve discovered some new ones in my corner of Mastodon, but one long time blog I’ve been really enjoying again is bix (who I can’t help but still prefix with The One True…).
In some ways it’s funny to me that these varied voices call out to me and make me feel connected. On the surface, Bix and I don’t really have much in common, although in early blogging days I did interact digitally quite a lot with Bix’s mom Kalilily, including participating in a very early big group blog that harboured a bunch of female bloggers at the time. But the voice in my head when I read Bix’s posts is definitely one of those that I keep coming back to, that make me feel like it’s all right, even when the topic of the post isn’t a particularly happy one.
The theme of this year is turning out to be one of voice and getting mine back. I know I’m not immortal and my words aren’t anything special. But if they are out there and one person sometime in the future reads them and thinks, “oh, that’s quite all right” then I will be satisfied. I’ve long been of the philosophy that our lives don’t have any meaning beyond the meaning we make for ourselves. I will keep looking for expression and connection; it doesn’t have to look like being good at face-to-face conversations and making friends. It doesn’t have to look like thousands of subscribers on my goofy little podcast. I am making my place here.