There is privacy enough

I am playing some golden oldie songs. Herman's Hermits "No milk today" and Sam Cooke and "Wonderful World." Songs that my boys have no desire to hear. My older son has never encountered songs where there are words that you can distinguish one from the other, in a sort of separation of meaning flow of sounds. He has his headphones on. Hubby is just back from delivering younger boy to his play date destination.

I tumble out of the writing to go downstairs, to find out how my younger son was with this friend who he hasn't seen for a while. I stop to eat a late, late lunch with my husband. Meal over, I return to the writing place. It is bread and tea here. I am eating although I am not eating.

I write things that may embarrass my family in my writing. I know when I write about my boys they aren't pleased with my descriptions of them. But I protect their privacy. I keep their names out of the blogs, there are no pictures of them and we are alone in this space and as anonymous as strangers across the wide highway of the Internet can be. We are strangers but we are passing letters from one car to another. Strangers.

I do not believe we can be anything more unless we meet in person and even then, we have an ocean between us and no craft to take me to you. Therefore, I tell myself there is privacy enough. If you write you must make the writing reveal something or there is nothing in the writing. But you can ensure there is privacy enough.


With all the froth about privacy, I try to keep the family out of the blogs in the most intimate details. But writing is not about being sealed up and packaged. Nope. Writing is about speaking intimately. In a world that is full of inanimate beings engaged in rubber suit encounters, I am dying for this type of intimate disclosure and contact and the only way I can get it is in the writing.


That is all what writing is. It is revelation and it is deception. We write. We reveal our insides to a world and we reveal the others in our world. Some of it is real and truthful. The other parts? Who knows? We write to find out who we are and we write to learn who others are. Since we are not clear glass vessels, there will also be deception and fuzzy areas.

So there is invasion of privacy of the other and there is revelations of ones inner territory and there is open borders, no passport and no visa required. That is the draw and attraction of writing for me.

There is no other place where you can go and work on your authentic self. Where you can just be who you think you are in this moment of time. It is strange to think that the authentic self, is just something that our brain has concocted out of thousands of possible models it could have chosen. What made our clusters of neurons decide to choose this model of the self? And what makes this self predominate over all the other selves? Why is it considered bad to muck around inside oneself and reveal the intimate, private self?

Why do we not go to the inner self and get to know it more often? Why are we all engaged in ensuring privacy and not in ensuring self knowledge?

It is strange. I come to the writing place. I'm hampered by the sense of writing but not writing too revealingly. But I'm writing. But why do I feel I can't write as openly as I'd like to? Is it social mores? Is it considered journal work to write about feelings? Or is it simply that this feeling stuff is too sentimental and therefore not worth putting out in public - sort of like intimate clothing hanging out on a public line?

Journal writing, intimate writing, the personal, self revealing writing has value and can be written in blogs. I don't believe we are doing business letters on blogs. We are writing about matters we care about. And what matters to most of us are the following sectors of our lives - our beloved, our children, our extended family, our friends if we have them, our community, our society, our economy (that nebulous strangely amok bull running through our marketplace right now) and yes, our egos. I think we have to be careful not to hurt real living souls with our writing but you have to be careful to be truthful when you write and this may mean writing painful facts about your life that may hurt those you love.

Writing is not about hurting others with your thoughts, feelings and acts of writing. Writing is about learning to write the best you can. If, in the practice of writing, you are extremely truthful, and there is hurt there in the piece, try to make that writing as non-sticky as you can. By this, I remove details of identity. I say, older boy, younger boy. I do not ever try to identify any of those I write about. Why do that? It hurts.

It hurts but it will be written. It just need not be given to the other to hurt. What hurts has power. There is energy there in that hurt. There in no energy in pieces that are safe. The safety of a piece makes it dead.

There is privacy enough in my blog writing. I am a stranger on the Internet highway. I am passing a letter to you. There is intimate details in that letter but no identifying details. I give you my insides and my life in pieces. You can toss the paper. You can refuse the letter. But writing, the writing practice requires me to write the letters. Truthfully.