Currently This

Back when blogs were still called 'journals' by those of us unwilling to admit we weren't really writing anything, design was a big part of your status in the blogging community. The artistic intricacy or stark simplicity of your design was as important as any actual literary content.

My first site was at Geocities. Remember when Geocities had neighborhoods that housed various journals of similar content? I entered the genre at geocities/wellesley/something because I was writing mostly about women's issues (I was big on militant feminism at one point). I knew nothing about HTML so I searched the net and learned what I could. Before I knew it, I was publishing embarrassing two column layouts of black and stars and big purple fonts.

It was hideous but I was really proud. And really confused when I was greeted with snickers and a pat on the head by those writers I most wanted to take me seriously. My writing meant nothing, see. What mattered is whether or not you could link proudly to my site as proof that you were a 'serious' journalist.

I spent years trying to come up with the right design, but it was never good enough. As much as I hate change, I get bored very quickly so either I would change my mind and come up with a different layout everyday or someone else would tell me how awful it looked and I would change it then. Someone else was getting more hits on their counters and I would try to emulate them.

I spent as much time on that as I did writing. Being hailed as a real writer was as important to me as designing a serious site. The more I tried to write, the worse I got at both. It got to be that I hated even messing with it, but loved the outlet it provided me.

I have a challenging family. Lot of genetic crap going on here, special needs kids, that kind of thing. I'm a busy frazzled mother who spends most of her time arguing with doctors or teachers and virtually no time dealing with her own various issues. I'm crap with people, socially phobic so even if I had had the time to go out with friends, the very idea would have given me the creeping horrors. Thus I had no place to talk. To vent, to scream, to indulge.

The internet gave me that. But I was wasting it with pretentious crap about design and posturing.

People who create need to create. Whatever it is that floats your boat - writing, sculpture, composing - you need to do it. To deny yourself that outlet is to court insanity. You do it because you have to. I found I needed to write and I only wrote well when I stopped trying to. I wrote well when I spoke of my kids. When my oldest got sick and almost died, when one of the three would do some shining thing that made me weep with pride and awe and marvel. When I spoke of rape and child abuse and men's reproductive rights and a woman's rights to choose. When I was married. When I got cancer. When I was homeschooling my daughter. I wrote well because I wasn't bothering to write. I was indulging a passion. Passionate anger or fear or fierce love.

By the time I noticed I had something of a following, I had mostly stopped obsessing about design. I stopped caring at all when I started getting notes from women who went to get checked after reading while I processed the procedures of cancer, its discovery and treatment. I got letters from people who had also been abused and were looking for help, from people who thought my opinions about abortion were shit. From people who still thought my design sucked. From people wanting to do whatever they could to support me.

And then one day I walked away from the internet and the friends (and enemies) I had made there. I had a nervous breakdown, to be honest. My oldest daughter was very ill, I had just had a hysterectomy and was beginning to show the first signs of mania that hit bi-polar women around forty. I was hospitalized, over medicated, under medicated, poked prodded and tatooed. If it hadn't been for my husband and kids I would have driven my car off a cliff. Nothing seemed to make any sense to me anymore. Writing held no interest for me. I only had a few things left to say and there are only so many ways you can say them.

Then one day I just started again.

And here I am. Freed from caring about design and finding new things to say and wondering if I will stop again in a week or if I will keep going and if either will mean anything about me at all and if so, what?