A Salute to the Culture of Oversharing...
We love to see the bloopers.
When I get a DVD, which - come on, what with DVR? - is pretty rare these days except in the case of my favorite television sitcoms, I look most forward to seeing the outtakes - the bloopers. I like the idea of knowing how a character is supposed to respond, then being let into those moments when it all goes to hell and an actor breaks character. I like seeing how that person really laughs, how they naturally react after they've made a mistake.
We love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.
Sometimes I ask myself why I slowed down my writing here so drastically in the past year or so. I ask myself why I stopped blogging regularly about the mundanities of my life, even though I was able to make you laugh through much of them. The truth is, you aren't the only one subjected to my self-imposed cut-off. Let's just say I developed a distrust of the safety of sharing and of embracing others into my "world", and that's something that I have been wrestling with a lot over this time.
Accompanying this depression-slash-hermitage-slash-intense level of MEH-ness, grew a general crabbiness each time I tried to sit down to write. The truth was, all that was really going through my head was the mishmash of how I was trying to unravel my own confusion and gain some deeper understanding of my life events, my purpose, my direction, my my MY ME ME ME blahblahblahblech. I really grew exhausted of subjecting this space to what I felt was merely becoming a virtual spewing of self-therapy. And I thought, after FIVE years here, is this all I have to put 'out there' again? I'd really rather be be making you all insanely jealous with some kick-ass project I was taking on or bragging about my clumsy yet successful completion of some marathon or at the very least come off as the Über Sexy Confident Mastermind Take Charge of the World Creative Genius I wish I felt like.
In all fairness, I bet some of you would have really liked if I had borne the discomfort and written it all out anyway. Not that I haven't read about someone's struggle or heartache and felt intensely grateful for their ability to share, their adeptness at putting into words something that I myself had felt yet been unable to clarify so well. The fact is that some of those moments deeply define and even cement our relationships online; that's part of the inescapable nature of this culture of virtual friendships and stranger adoration.
We love to see the bloopers.
If I had been writing more during this time, I would have probably told you about feeling abandoned and betrayed by people close to me, about our dealing with my husband's diagnosis as a diabetic, about feeling inadequate in my talents, about turning into a vapid lump for long periods of time, about compartmentalizing to the point of numbness, about our first concerns regarding the possibility of children in our future, about reawakening, about making new friends, about almost auditioning for a musical, about INSOMNIA DEAR GOD, about yoga's amazing and strange healing, about a quest for mindfulness, about having to induce a little brown chihuahua to...er...regurgitate the ear of a plastic teddy bear and crying guiltily the entire time, about taking on special photographic projects, about learning to say the word "photographer" without a self-deprecating shoulder shrug and a ready dismissal of my abilities, about my hair finally growing to bra-strap length and the trip to the stylist who ripped out about a 1/4 pound of it with her fingernails, about our desire to move ANYWHERE but here, about new dreams of writing and creating...
As I grow past this shedding of skin, yet another stage of life that I suppose I have had to go through as part of my experience...my desire is to make myself Write It Out whether I feel the muse slap me against the head or not. I want to be more wildly open with you again, if only to be more wildly open with myself. Perhaps I'll even tell you the next time I crack open the door of a theater, peek around the velvet curtain just inside it blocking out the sun, barely view some young beauty in a sweatshirt reminiscent of Fame chatting up some guys, and turn & run like hell back to my car with my Singer's Anthology to drive away and get a giant self-loathing Oreo Blizzard from the Dairy Queen drive through.
After all...we love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.
