The common-place book

There is plenty to read on my blogroll, and I find new gems—no stone unmined—every week.  Stef and Deborah represent themselves and their experience with lucidity and clarity multiple times a week, and are collaborating with others on The Hand Mirror, whose premise shows what many of us know: that the second wave has not yet dissipated.

My online recherches for material on Murakami, whose Norwegian Wood I am working on (in translation) with my literary studies students, brought me in passing to the selfdivider, which is well-turned indeed.  Reading this new writing has led me to think about the kind of writing I am doing here, and how it has changed in the four years since I began writing, in this mode, online.

It strikes me that I started what has become a substantial archive, in whose contents I often hesitate to rummage, in order to reconstruct a writing self.  The sustaining, though chaotic, structures of my postgrad years were behind me, and although I had adapted to fit my job, it was not a happy or easy adaptation.  That sense, ubiquitous at the time I began writing here, that to be an effective member of the hive I had to abandon the ways of thinking and working that had worked so well as a postgraduate (to the extent that I would have said they made me me) drove me off in search of something different.  By extended reflection, by narrating my day-to-day details and by reaching out, making connections with many who still, like me, keep an online trail, I built something of myself that my job couldn’t own.

By long strain and painful growth, work is rather better now.  I have gone from being a newbie to a survivor to an old hand in fewer than seven years.  I’ve learned, too, about the seasonal changes by which my depression travels: the hard evidence of the archives tells me that twice a year I will go under, according to the artificial rhythms of the university which echo the seasons themselves.  This knowledge, though not necessarily consoling, is a kind of power.

I’ve learned, too, about myself as someone engaged with aesthetics, the quadruple cocktail of film, music, reading and visual arts that provides counterpoint to my thinking and sometimes redirects it at the source.  This is neither rare nor distinctive in blogs or in life, but understanding myself as someone engaged with what could be described as the arts or culture more generally has helped in those times when I am tempted to ask why I don’t love bands as much as blogger X, nor movies as passionately as blogger Y.  To each her cobbled-together own.

What I have noticed in the last year or two, however, is that the things that first I wrote in order to achieve now take effect outside this record, and that, as I have said before, my best thinking, writing and doing tends not to make these archives.  This is not so useful for future selves looking for a record, but is does point to a higher kind of functioning that what I had before (since no-one who wears the label “high-functioning depressive” does it with the hope that this is their affective end-point).  That fresh self that got its start, petrie-dish style, right here, now has an outer and inner life of her own which I no longer want to narrate in such detail.  As a result, this space resembles far more a common-place book than a systematic personal narrative.

Tagged as: Blogroll, reflecting, writing