I've long been a fan of Offbeat Bride, a fabulous website/cultural phenomena/documentation of so many cultural phenomena it would make your head spin. But the past two days, as the final slew of papers and misery crashed down on my semester, I've been distracting myself by pouring over Offbeat Bride creator Ariel's fabulous blog Electrolicious, which she has kept since 2001. She does a fabulous job of balancing the personal and the public, deciding just how much to expose to her eager internet audience. She leaves out the TMI but isn't afraid to look back on her 1990s self and say "hey, I was there, and I'm not going to hate on that because we've all come from somewhere that we aren't anymore." There's a lot of really productive, positive honesty there.
I've been in a terrible mood for the past month or so. I've been insecure in a very high school oh-if-only-I-was-someone-else kind of way. It's a bad habit I have-- feeling dissatisfied with myself in a way I can't quite pin down, so I express it to myself by turning everyone around me into an idol of cool. It would be tempting to do this with the person I imagine Ariel to be after reading her blog. "Oh," I could tell myself, "She was a raver and was in on this amazing cultural moment you were too young to be a part of." Or, "Oh, she has this fabulous life that involves writing and tea and a wonderful husband...you dig stuff like that and except for the tea and a boyfriend, you're no where even close!" Because I am mean and childish to myself like that. Aren't we all? Don't we all tell ourselves horrible things? (PS: If we don't all do this, don't tell me, I'd just feel even worse.) But at the end of the blog entry and the Flickr photo stream, as always ends up being the case, I'm just projecting things I don't like (I don't have a "scene" to derive a community identity from, I live in a small somewhat dull town, I lack many excuses for my inner outrageous fashion mavin to be let loose, blah, blah, blah) onto someone else, who I conveniently have never met, lives on the other side of the country, and probably isn't any more the sum of her blog than I am of mine.
So it easy to put all that negative nancy envy and project back into the nasty little box it came out of. But once that's done, there's still something genuine I took away from Electrolicious, and to envy about its author. And that's to be unafraid of examining even difficult, squirmy feelings that defy you to pinpoint them or even put them away. I spend most of my time trying not to be overly emotional, and it's a shame. I think I miss out on a lot of valuable self-discovery and joy and pain and experience that way. It all started in high school, when I didn't know how to put certain feelings away or understand why I had them in the first place. It was easier to stay busy and ignore them until they went away on there own. And in a lot of cases I was forced to deal with what I was feeling because of the intensity of it all, since adolescent angst is by definition pretty in-your-face. But it became a bad habit to try stifle those moments, or worse, moments of delirious happiness, or slow, easy satisfaction. To feel somehow ashamed for being so deliriously happy because of how much I care about Alex that I want to tell everyone and shout from rooftops, or because a view I saw driving down Signal Mountain was so unutterably lovely I got teary, or how there's that one credit card commercial that makes me get a lump in my throat, or even to think that just because I need to put a feeling in the nasty box, that means it wasn't right to have that feeling.
It doesn't have to be online, or even in a paper journal, but I'm deciding here and now that it's important to honor even your most embarrassing, unnecessarily torturously gross moments (whether that's gross because you feel icky or gross because it sickens other people with its positivity). Maybe this is just me trying to tell myself that I should be off examining my feelings instead of depressing poems by William Morris for Victorian lit papers due in two days. Self-exploration and affirmation as procrastination? It rhymes, so it must be true! (Just like Jesus is the Reason for the Season, and Obama/Osama!). Taking things out of the nasty box every once and a while means obsessing about myself more (in a good way, not a guilty, narcissistic way) and about other people, who I can't be, less. Basically, as long as I'm envying other people for being fabulous, I can at least emulate productively, and I'm taking away a lesson on this one that in the long run, I'd be a lot happier if I don't beat myself up all the time for not being an emotional moderate.
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