Something To Do
Well, despite the fact that I have a very, very limited audience (maybe 1 person, and even then, I'm sure they only tune in upon occasion), blogging is something to do. It's different from physical journaling (where I have consistantly indulged in and mulled over my own personal melodrama's from the time I was 8 years old till now) simply because here, on the internet, there is the possibility of an audience. Sending a message in a bottle out to sea is a good analogy. Maybe someone will read this, or maybe they won't. That simple fact significantly changes the tone of my musings. This might seem obvious, but I still find it interesting.
The other day I was reading over my journal from 8th grade. Most entries are personal. They're the sad and self depricating thoughts of my pre-pubescent, confused, lonely self. 6th, 7th, and 8th grades (10-13 y.o.) were very painful times for young Sophia. One typical entry read as such: "Dear Journal, I am disliking my life right now. I don't think I'll go out for recess tomorrow. I don't like going out for it, or at least not right now. XO Sophia." The majority of the journal continues in this sad, vague manner, until entries written during an 8th grade sleepover trip to Washington D.C. These entries assume a significantly different tone: "Dear Journal, I have so much to tell you! Washington is so fun!" I was lying; Washington was no fun at all. I was lying because I feared (or maybe hoped) a classmate would snoop and read what I was writing.
A little background: I had been enrolled in the same small school from the time I was 5 until 13, and at age 10 I had lost all my friends and remained a loner until I switched schools for 9th grade. To describe my past loneliness in a nutshell, I often tell people this debacle: during lunch time our grade of 30 kids were assigned to sit freely at 4 different tables; all the other kids would squeeze into 3 tables, and I would sit at the 4th. Each day various kids would shyly or carelessly come up and ask me if they could take an extra chair so that they could squeeze into a more sociable table. I wasn't exactly a geek, and I certainly wasn't popular, I was just alone. And so my journal became my sole confidant.
The D.C. entry continues: "Well, first we went to Burger King, which was fun, but I brought my own lunch because I don't really eat fast food. I went to the bathroom with Katie, Lindsay, and Marley, and we were all gossiping about boys, which was funny. I found out that Javier and Marley are dating! But then when I came out of the stall they had all left and then I couldn't find them, so I went back into the bus and at lunch there with the teachers. Next we went to the hotel, and none of our room keys worked, so we all had to go get different ones! Cheap hotels, haha!" You get the subtext. I was trying to seem light, positive, just in case someone was reading.
During those years the words of my mother constantly reverberated in my head: "Nobody likes a downer," and my inner thoughts were almost always "downers." I'd have to have been mentally slow, or completely removed from reality, for them not to be. But I wasn't, and reality was hating recess, trying to spend the majority of lunch time in the nurses office or in the bathroom, and watching from a distance as my hopeless crushes flirted with other girls and occasionally slipped me snide remarks about my bad skin or deficient softball skills.
Anyway, the point is: personal reality is always distorted when there is even the chance of some sort of audience. And, with language, there is always an audience. Even personal journals are a projection that don't fully capture a persons interiority; words themselves can't capture that. As Beckett said: "The danger lies in the certainty of identifications." Our own insides can never be fully verbalized, considering we often can't understand them ourselves, and language will never fully suffice. Yet we try, and we try, because we're social animals. Even alone at a lunch table, or sequestered in the nurses office faking an illness to avoid peer contact, we're still social animals. And we'll still try to get ourselves, or others to understand.
I feel like people are analogous to rooms across the hall from each other: close enough that they're able to open the doors and talk, maybe even venture into the other persons room for some brief, telling moments, yet they'll never know what it's like to live in the other room. Some hopefuls, who believe in soul mates, think that some people have always lived in one proverbial room ("Two people, one thought,") and just have the task of finding each other. I'm not a complete pessimist, but in my honest opinion, this kind of connection could only exist with significant construction, and a lot of demolition. And even still, with ourselves as our audience, most people seem to be in the closets of their own rooms. Closets of denial, distortion, and delusion. Ok, this analogy has gone on long enough.
The other day I was reading over my journal from 8th grade. Most entries are personal. They're the sad and self depricating thoughts of my pre-pubescent, confused, lonely self. 6th, 7th, and 8th grades (10-13 y.o.) were very painful times for young Sophia. One typical entry read as such: "Dear Journal, I am disliking my life right now. I don't think I'll go out for recess tomorrow. I don't like going out for it, or at least not right now. XO Sophia." The majority of the journal continues in this sad, vague manner, until entries written during an 8th grade sleepover trip to Washington D.C. These entries assume a significantly different tone: "Dear Journal, I have so much to tell you! Washington is so fun!" I was lying; Washington was no fun at all. I was lying because I feared (or maybe hoped) a classmate would snoop and read what I was writing.
A little background: I had been enrolled in the same small school from the time I was 5 until 13, and at age 10 I had lost all my friends and remained a loner until I switched schools for 9th grade. To describe my past loneliness in a nutshell, I often tell people this debacle: during lunch time our grade of 30 kids were assigned to sit freely at 4 different tables; all the other kids would squeeze into 3 tables, and I would sit at the 4th. Each day various kids would shyly or carelessly come up and ask me if they could take an extra chair so that they could squeeze into a more sociable table. I wasn't exactly a geek, and I certainly wasn't popular, I was just alone. And so my journal became my sole confidant.
The D.C. entry continues: "Well, first we went to Burger King, which was fun, but I brought my own lunch because I don't really eat fast food. I went to the bathroom with Katie, Lindsay, and Marley, and we were all gossiping about boys, which was funny. I found out that Javier and Marley are dating! But then when I came out of the stall they had all left and then I couldn't find them, so I went back into the bus and at lunch there with the teachers. Next we went to the hotel, and none of our room keys worked, so we all had to go get different ones! Cheap hotels, haha!" You get the subtext. I was trying to seem light, positive, just in case someone was reading.
During those years the words of my mother constantly reverberated in my head: "Nobody likes a downer," and my inner thoughts were almost always "downers." I'd have to have been mentally slow, or completely removed from reality, for them not to be. But I wasn't, and reality was hating recess, trying to spend the majority of lunch time in the nurses office or in the bathroom, and watching from a distance as my hopeless crushes flirted with other girls and occasionally slipped me snide remarks about my bad skin or deficient softball skills.
Anyway, the point is: personal reality is always distorted when there is even the chance of some sort of audience. And, with language, there is always an audience. Even personal journals are a projection that don't fully capture a persons interiority; words themselves can't capture that. As Beckett said: "The danger lies in the certainty of identifications." Our own insides can never be fully verbalized, considering we often can't understand them ourselves, and language will never fully suffice. Yet we try, and we try, because we're social animals. Even alone at a lunch table, or sequestered in the nurses office faking an illness to avoid peer contact, we're still social animals. And we'll still try to get ourselves, or others to understand.
I feel like people are analogous to rooms across the hall from each other: close enough that they're able to open the doors and talk, maybe even venture into the other persons room for some brief, telling moments, yet they'll never know what it's like to live in the other room. Some hopefuls, who believe in soul mates, think that some people have always lived in one proverbial room ("Two people, one thought,") and just have the task of finding each other. I'm not a complete pessimist, but in my honest opinion, this kind of connection could only exist with significant construction, and a lot of demolition. And even still, with ourselves as our audience, most people seem to be in the closets of their own rooms. Closets of denial, distortion, and delusion. Ok, this analogy has gone on long enough.
posted by Sophia at 2:53 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home