I, Too, Need to Write a Post
Or, do I? Why do I need to? It’s not the same as why Drew said he needed to write a post.
It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about with some degree of frequency for quite a while. A little over eight years now.
In 2016—for all sorts of reasons I don’t feel comfortable explaining in
detail—I deleted pretty much every trace of online self. My old Twitter
account, @clioweb, which I registered the summer of 2006 (early adopter); My
Flickr account; Del.icio.us (remember that?); even my GitHub profile and all the
code repositories I had. I also deleted my entire website, clioweb.org, which I
started in 2003 as a graduate student before WordPress even had themes, while
colleagues at CHNM and elsewhere were wondering whether blogging was something
academics should do. I don’t have backups of any of these things. I deleted it
all with the intent to never return, for many definitions of return.
My favorite author is Ursula K. Le Guin, and my favorite story of her’s is “The Day Before the Revolution,” and my favorite line in that story is “True journey is return.” So, with hesitation and doubt, I returned and I continue to return. I didn’t return because of this line or this story, but I’m returning to that line now to think about why I might need to write a post here. Why I might need to write a post on my current website. Why I might need to return to sharing the thoughts and feelings and ideas in my head with whoever used to want to read those years ago, and who might still wish to read them.
This is hard for me now, though. The person that I was so many years ago, who could tweet, give a presentation, organize with energy and joy a fairly successful unconference, or even churn out a blog post without any hesitation and doubt on a weekly basis seems like a complete different person to me. It feels now just like it felt in 2016, when one day I looked around my desk and felt like all the things there belonged to someone else, and I was sitting in their chair waiting for them to return. Those memories feel like someone else’s memories, ones I can’t fathom trying to imitate now.
But like Whitman, I contain multitudes, as do we all. (Don’t worry; I’ve gone to therapy and take meds and do all sorts of “self-care” things, even though I loathe both the phrase and its overuse.) The person I was waiting for at that desk in 2016 was the person already sitting there. I still have to keep convincing myself of that. We’re all carrier of the multitudes of our selves, and work on returning to those multitudes in different ways. Who those multitudes actually are, and how they manifest to meet all of you who might read this or might meet with me over coffee or in a classroom is, for me now, part of the “true journey” I find myself on.
So, I need to write a post to simply take another step on that journey of returning to myself, and see how the journey progresses.