The Final Title of My Old LJ Was "I Need To See Your Sources"

After I gathered twenty-two years of Thanksgiving links for the post last week, I had a think. Everything in each of those blog posts was true, but there was just so much missing. The stuff that was missing from the decades of blog posts would make for deeply compelling reading, but I won’t publish it here.

I blog – I have blogged – I will blog – in large part because I still have a childhood fear of my own truth being yanked away from me. I am an inveterate saver of calendars so I can look back at how I spent my days and check my own memories. When your father is an alcoholic and your mother a pathological narcissist, you tend to develop real trust issues. I need documented proof of my own lived life. That’s why the parts that were missing from the last twenty-two years of blogging made me sad. I remember the people I didn’t name for their own privacy. I’ve had intense friendships and more than friendships during that time. My relationships with my sisters and cousins are deeply important to me, and largely undocumented. But I don’t write about those things out of a lot of socially justified fear.

Mostly, I suppose, I worry about losing my current job. I love what I do right now more than I can express, and I have near constant anxiety that I will lose the position out of social awkwardness or other failure on my part. The bigger concern, of course, should be that I could lose the job just because sometimes jobs end for people - that’s happened to me plenty in the past as well. Half of the CNN cataloging staff lost their jobs this week. Much of Cartoon Network, Tru TV, and other workplaces deeply associated with Atlanta have collapsed over the last year. The career prospects in Atlanta right now are terrifying.

I can’t lose my current job. I’m really, really good at what I do, but none of that would matter if the wrong person in my workplace found my blogs and didn’t like them. Georgia remains an at-will employment state; I could be engineered into any of a dozen firable offenses with minimal effort. As I mentioned before, I have deeply rooted trust issues.

Then there’s the consideration of the feelings of those around me. It occurs to me as I type that my best friends would stick by me if I went for radical honesty in my writing. But I actually do worry about the feelings of others who aren’t my best friends but could be hurt if I wrote about, for instance, what the COVID years in the Lake Claire house were really like for me. It wasn’t an easy time for anyone, and I have two teenage daughters.

My options for really writing the full truth – or at least the truth as I live it – are to either lean on a pseudonym or thinly veiled fiction. That feels odd, as to me the whole point of fiction that I enjoy is escapism. I want to read about living in outer space, or riding dragons, or having usual powers. If a book is about how people struggle to make rent in a crumbling anocracy, I’m unlikely to read that story unless aliens, dragons, or superheroes show up. Ridiculous humor can work to keep me engaged in a story, as can scandal. I think the best roman-a-clef ever written was Another City, Not My Own. Dominic Dunne wrote that when he was at least twenty years older than I am now, and he still didn’t really tell his truth throughout. Dunne's omissions - his visits to bath houses and with younger men - don't matter to the reader though when he has solid stories to deliver like accidentally introducing Nancy Reagan to Heidi Fleiss.

My own truth, even when I’m near historical events, isn’t as interesting as Dominic Dunne’s, and so could not yet hold up reader interest the way he did. Maybe in another twenty years I’ll be ready to publish some thinly veiled scandal, but not right now. Right now, I have to figure out why we’re $300 short on rent. Right now, I have to come up with funds to help the kids have the best High School experience possible. Right now, it’s 2022, and the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. Right now, we’re all just doing our best.