I’ve been trying to remember the first year I blogged. It was a just called a webpage then. Had to be somewhere around 1998, my son was 2-3 and I had started working at a computer store, knowing nothing but having it all make sense, me having a knack of learning and fixing basic computer issues. I was also in the middle of an online new age group. a crappy relationship was ending with my son’s father, and I was journalling online about all the weird ideas and channeling and etc I was into. All I really remember about it was a friend who showed me how to repeat the image of the spiral wire spine of a notebook all the way down a page in HTML.
Then Blogger was created. (I may still have pages up there.) I took off writing out all my thoughts and life and etc onto the internet. I had blogs for feminism, mysticism, computer, art, parenting, all separate, most anonymous. All written in the nights I sat at home alone while my son slept.
I liked to be super open, super honest and really hated reactions and feedback. It hurt when people didn’t get what I was talking about. Weird when folks I didn’t know thought they could hold an opinion on my life.
I was living in NYC when 9/11 happened. I saw it from the top floor of a building on 14th street – The towers on fire, so huge in front of my face but still a mile away. In the aftermath I started online dating like a fiend. Online dating sites, NERVE in particular, had just took off. I met a dude who took me to a crazy open mic that was music, art, writing, just getting some attention, and a little bit of therapy for everyone.
My moving to NYC in 93 from Santa Fe was to be an actress. Then I got knocked up early on, tried to settle down, never was able to really do the biz of acting as NYC runs it and had been deeply missing the stage and the attention without realizing it. Seeing people on stage experimenting and looking for their artforms and voices made my heart jump, I wanted in. I started going on stage two nights a week, purely amateur, purely self exploration, with the idea that I could find something to create that would explode into the world and make me money as well as fame. I also found a community who approved of me, who LIKED me, many of whom I “dated” and that seemed to fulfill my fantasies of being an underground artist struggling to the top.
I blogged all about it.
Fast forward what 2001 to 2020? 19 years? am I that old now? and I’m living alone in a casita in New Mexico, life having sucked the stage art and blogging out of me years ago, though I have struggled to write a novel and started oil painting along the way. I’ve grown inward, feel ineffectual, am struggling in the midst of a pandemic, my son in college across the country and me wondering “what have I done to myself this time?”
I wanted to art it up. At almost 50 (a couple of weeks away as I write this) I recovered from Covid, sorta (I guess I’m a “long-hauler”) found a place to move to on Craigslist and restarted my entire life in the complete opposite space of where I had been living for 25 years.
My plan was to force myself to create, to have the isolation and the time and the non interruptions and…
Well, I’ve been here for 2 and half months and while I have made small forays into art, dilettanted my way here and there I mostly find myself on the couch watching tv when not working remotely to pay for it all.
I have some skills, a whole lot of stories, ideas of how to express it all but the drive – that 20 to 40 something drive of having to get it out – is missing. The ever present cloud of age and knowing it’s all rapidly heading towards death (OMG THE LAST 25 YEARS WENT SO FAST) and wanting to actually have DONE something is there but the youthful arrogance of thinking it will matter is gone.
I’m sure I have other actual psychological issues as well.
All of which leads me back to blogging. The alpha and omega of my adulthood art life apparently. A place to put my work, a place to natter about the goopy thoughts that make art hard, a place to try and build a need to be heard again.
Enjoy.