Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. Mark Twain.
If there is one thing I notice about blogging, as both a writer and a reader, is that sometimes we do not take ourselves out of our stories enough to get the proper perspective needed to determine whether we’re telling them properly. Not unrelated to this, in my case, is the point that I rarely write stories in the first person; I’ve been writing here for so long, in this approximation of self that the online world and my own abilities allow, that I find it hard to step ‘out of character’. I can, but it’s a test I have little time to take.
Rawer posts, banged out in anger or bafflement to an event or situation, and immediately published, while stirring and appeal to our souls to rise to action or invoke our sympathy, are not necessarily ‘good’ as far as the writing goes; and in many cases that doesn’t matter, nor should it. I certainly don’t endorse a fragile, even flinty, sensibility where we examine our emotions as if they were safely contained within a petri dish. Angry, love, grief – these are all emotions we as personal bloggers often land ourselves in this sphere writing about in the first place, wrestling with the animal, embracing it sometimes.
All of this is to say that I have come to my computer today with stories to tell and I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to do it. How can I describe the shock of learning a cousin of mine died suddenly the other day. She was younger than me, had a variety of social media accounts like most Gen Y girls, and that the sight of her last ever Instagram photo – clear blue skies over the beach at which she lived – shall haunt me forever. How are any of us to know if the photo we take, the kiss we leave on a loved one’s cheek might be our last? I cannot possibly imagine the pain her family is feeling and I send them my profoundest condolences.
The world also lost another light this week: Susan Nieber, otherwise known as whymommy, passed away after battling Inflammatory Breast Cancer for the past five years. Her crusade and advocacy for women to check themselves and look after their health resonated all over the world and she fought her fight with grace and positivity.
Cities and Lights At Night, by Riley, stars for Susan
Vincent Van Gogh was said to have said that if he ever felt in the need for something like religion, he went out and painted the stars. At such times as this, my typing is an attempt at something similar. And if our sincere emotions are involuntary, as Twain said, then perhaps I need to revise my original argument to this post. That we need to let ourselves feel our stories, at least for a little while: blog slow, blog raw, write how you want.
Stories make us unique; they’re what make us extraordinary. And human.
*Title inspired by the lyric: Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun. John Lennon
