It’s been a while since I have written. Again. I am so bad at keeping up with my blog!
I’ve been thinking a lot about privacy and why I started writing minutae of my life online since I was 20. It’s been twelve years! And with my real name for six years! Or whatever. In this very blog!
I guess one of the reasons I am thinking about privacy is because of how many people google each other and this blog comes up right under my facebook profile in Google when you type in my name. I mean, in a way it is great, because I feel like this whole thing is an art project, and people can contact me. And then I think about this art project’s impact on my life and how many people would have major prejudices or assumptions based on information contained herein and pass me up for jobs, housing, or end up treating me as less than human or weird in other ways. But I still feel like it’s important to do things I find meaning in, like talk about the politics of having to share private space because you have a mental illness, or look at the progress of Bunnyhug or other projects I’ve done or am working on, or personal struggles that take up considerable time and energy and limit my creative output or productivity or just life quality.
One of my professors way back when told me I was in danger of just being a persona, and in a way it’s true because I seem to mine my own life struggles to create some kind of image of what it’s like to be so marginalized. But still, it’s an image. And sometimes the public/performance me is so different from the private me, and there really has always been a private me. I mean, everyone has SOME secrets they have never told anyone.
That takes me off on a tangent. I was listening to tv the other day while toodling around on the iPad and I heard this announcer for a Jerry Springer/Dr. Phil type show saying scandalously “These people have fantasies they have NEVER told their partner!” Like it was a bad thing to withhold private, possibly embarrassing information from your partner. I don’t know about you but fantasies can be about really extreme things, some of which could be illegal or horribly dangerous or just gross in practice rather than as a concept. So if you want to just keep it a private personal fantasy then why should you tell your partner?? It’s kind of stupid. Some things your partner doesn’t need to know about! My god, this whole brutal honesty thing is pretty rank, sometimes it’s better to just keep something in your own head. And sometimes you just want to keep a few secrets.
Anyway, I could always “prune” my blog, or something like that, although it feels so self censoring, and I was trying to get away from internalized censorship (although I realize it sounds different after reading my thoughts on certain secret personal fantasies). I will just have to suck it up and stand proudly by my bad reputation as a notorious underground crazy halfbreed lesbian video artist. Who drinks and smokes pot and cigarettes and always tries to quit.
NEVER QUIT QUITTING YOU QUITTER!