From Eden to Island: The Evolution of an LJ

Sometimes I wonder why I maintain this LJ so faithfully; when I started it five and a half years ago, I was deeply enamored of fandom and its endless network and convinced that it was here where I would carve my niche. I would set up shop, and eventually, I'd become part of a vast and lovely knitting circle. Freed from my natural reserve, I'd be able to connect, perhaps even establish lifelong friendships. And yes, I'd have a place where the folks who read my stories could stop and give me a metaphorical scratch behind the ears. The Internet would be my crip utopia.

Except it didn't work out that way. My reserve, the natural sense of self-preservation necessitated by being broken, faded, but my plumage wasn't bright. I was opinionated, often obstinately so. I could be loud, crass, and obnoxious. I didn't say what I didn't mean, even if it was the polite thing to do, and I always said precisely what I did mean, even if it wasn't. I was not, alas, an Internet elder statesman, ever the diplomat. I was Daniel Boone, standing upon the hallowed tables of Congress with my guns blasting and offering to show the assembly my penis. For the first time in my life, I was being heard, and I was giddy.

I am still those things. I am brusque, rigid, sometimes unduly harsh. I am obdurate, arrogant when it comes to my writing and deeply insecure about most everything else. My glib honesty has hurt and alienated former flisters. While I am sorry I hurt them, sorry that I spoke sooner than I ought, I am not sorry that I spoke honestly when I spoke. I'm sorry I was snide and accused bookgirlwa of wallowing in self-pity purely for the jones of railing uselessly against a disability that will never improve and against a system that couldn't give two dribbling shits if it ate enough Ex-Lax to grease an elephant and squatted over King Priam's latrine with butt cheeks a-spread.

I still wonder why she can find no happiness, even if it's the scant, temporary happiness of a good fork-fingered wank.

I'm sorry I hurt obsidiantears74 by asking why the death of a South Korean she'd never met had unraveled her.

I'm not sorry I asked. I should've asked differently, been less a pupil of the Temperance Brennan school of social grace. I should've waited a few days to pose the question, or perhaps asked more softly. But if she hadn't wanted anyone to ask, she should've turned off comments.

I wish I were duller in both tooth and mind, more convivial and stupidly perky. I wish I were more Dumbledore and Ron Weasley and less the bastard offspring of Snape and Ernie Macmillan, a dour tool whom most respect for his talent, but whom they secretly wish would fall into a hole and never return. I wish I weren't so desperate to be heard that I drowned everyone else out.

As for my stories, well, not many read them anymore. And I don't want to hear that of course you do; you're just too busy/lazy to say so. It's bollocks and so much rose-scented smoke up my ass, and even if it isn't, it doesn't do me any good. It's like a deaf-mute logger yelling "Timber!" at a blind man after the tree has crushed his head. I'm still writing because I like to do it, and I suspect I will until the mental gears that make it possible grind to a halt, choked with dust and plaque deposits. I just don't have the same urgency to post the word pictures publicly. I've got two Supernatural stories near completion, and they were just as satisfying to create as the ones that hang here in my public gallery. They'll go up eventually, but I no longer need the unveiling to validate their existence. It's enough just to write them and say, "I wrote that." And that's good because what I write no longer buys me a place at the table even here in my knitting circle. It's a hard realization, and it pisses me off, but that's my problem. Them's the breaks, and fandom never promised me a pot to piss in. Sometimes you just have to dig a hole and squat and hope you don't show your ass to the rest of the damn village.

So, the Internet isn't my Eden. It's a virtual island, a handy change of scenery from the terrestrial island I inhabit on the other side of the screen you're reading. It hasn't brought me a Rockwellian existence of friends who share their hearts, and who'll miss me when I'm gone from either island. Or both. Nor has it brought me the paltry solace of e-lebrity.

I keep this LJ because even shouting down a well is proof of life, and I can hope that one day, someone passing by the well will hear my dim and distant echo and stop to listen, if only for a moment. Listen, and wonder who I was and why I left a piece of myself embedded in the damp stone and cool, muddy water.