The "Real" Authentic Life

 

Recently, a friend who has been encouraging me triggered a load of emotion: angst, anger, and shame.  Did he set out to do any of those things?  Not at all.  He merely asked a simple question, meant to be an encouragement, a gentle shove to what he perceives is the next natural step with my writing.  And it IS the next step, but I've been hesitating for too long on the brink. 

I resented the question mightily.  And that forced me to stop and examine a whole load of stuff I've been shoving into the dark closets to be dealt with later...sort of like that pile of mending and ironing I haven't attended to that is growing into a ridiculous sized pile.

This week, I took a deep breath, and I concentrated on unpacking the whole messy pile of feelings.  I knew I could not keep putting off digging into the depths and discovering exactly why I was having such a big emotional response to this over and over again.

It was time to discover why I had determined I should be ashamed of Blue House Journal and the work I have done there for the past 15 years.  Oddly enough, in the very first post of Blue House Journal, I mention my desire to be authentic.    I lay down the persona of Penny Ann Poundwise, a character I'd created and wrote as, for almost 15 years.

Penny Ann Poundwise had been a wonderful character to hide behind.  She had it all together, that Penny Ann.  She didn't have a messy home, didn't struggle to cope with a messy life. She didn't procrastinate.  She was frugal with money and time.  She was a terrific wife, a great mom, a peaceful sort and a grand all around person to have as a mentor.  That persona was very much my mentor over those years, but the longer I wrote, the more I began to feel restless, hampered.  Untrue.  

I needed to drop out of character and let myself be known.  John and I talked it over and bounced around names for a new blog for a good two weeks before I let Penny Ann go her way and I became myself online.  We hit upon calling the new space, Blue House Journal when I told him that I'd very much like for the new blog to be a diary about my daily life.  

And that's what the Blue House Journal site became.  Sometimes, I went deep, sometimes, I skimmed along the surface of things, but I shared my faults, my failings, my fears, my victories, my revelations and insights.

It was a diary, a true one of a real life.  It was me.

Then somehow over the years, I got very shy about sending people to the site to read my work.  I felt shame.  I felt inadequate, pretentious, that my writing lacked 'real' (i.e. monetary) value.  Held up against all my personal fears and failings, it seemed anything but authentic, though I had been nothing but genuinely myself.

I recently talked it over deeply with John.  I'd mentioned to him my feelings of guilt and shame about BHJ a few times, but I'd never talked to him about it in depth. 

"You've invested nearly 30 years into your writing.  People have published your work alongside their own.  You have had 'real' authors read your work and compliment it.  WHY are you letting one person become the reason why you'd see that work as less than it is?" 

With his help I figured out that I'd let my friend's voice become the critic in my head.  Not that the friend had ever given me harsh criticism, but I had been imagining what I supposed he might think.  You see, he's very intellectual, the sort of smart that is truly brilliant with an easy and natural understanding of the heady sort of writings that I also have read...but he reads it once and understands it, while I must read it three or four times over with a dictionary and internet access to fully understand most of it.  

BHJ was hardly intellectual fodder.  Not without depth, but definitely simple compared to my friend's usual level of thinking.

That was just one layer to work through, however.  

Okay, so J is NOT the critic.  He never has been. 

But I had to go further down to the root of my shame and what would finally kill it.

I felt that I needed to edit the whole body of work at BHJ. Yes, all 15 years of it.  When I journaled about it, I wrote in my notes that I needed to elevate that blog.  

I contemplated that idea for a day or two.  I concluded that I do need to go back and re-edit my work.  Spell checks, punctation checks, rewriting messy sentences that don't read as smoothly as they should nor convey the thought as well as it might.  And doing some well-considered deletions, too.  Dead links and pictures that have failed to load for years and repetitious posts that don't really contribute anything to my body of work except leave a blank space.  But I don't need to elevate it in any manner other than by making the above-mentioned edits.  

Ultimately, BHJ is exactly what I meant it to be: a journal of a life lived in this house.  I reasoned that dressing it up too much, glamming it up and making it look like something it was not would be the ultimate wrong.  It would ruin that body of work entirely.  I never wanted it to be pretentious.  Penny Ann had been half fiction.  Her persona wasn't real.  Her perfection wasn't mine.  I always meant BHJ to be as I initially described what a reader might expect:  

 I'm still a country girl, so certainly observations about the natural world around me.  I continue to be a homemaker so plenty of homey things including how to save.  Revelations as I pursue my Bible studies.  Personal opinions...  Reflections upon life.  Personal philosophies.  Questions to which I'm seeking answers.  Poetry that moves me.  Books I've been reading, movies I've seen...  

I came to the conclusion this week, after wrestling around with the whole issue of embarrassment and shame, that if I feel either emotion about a blog that accurately and fully captured my home life, then I must therefore feel embarrassment and shame about what I've revealed of myself, my values, my life. And there my thinking cleared up rather rapidly.

To deny BHJ its value is also to deny the value of my work in my home and of my life overall.  And that I cannot do!  I know that it will never be LITERATURE. It will never be a great philosophical work, not spiritual.  But Blue House Journal is a truthful body of work that accurately and fully represents a very real life that has been lived authentically.  Sometimes foolishly, sometimes messily, sometimes with insights and wisdom that surprise me but most thoroughly real.

Finally, I got down to the last level of the shame, embarrassment and guilt.  Those are fault emotions I've learned to foster because of my past.  From childhood and into my first marriage, I learned to put up a good front, to fake it...And to wear all the negative and often untrue labels I'd allowed to become permanently attached to my being over those years.  I'm not wearing those labels anymore.  It's okay to show myself as I am: flawed, striving to be better, struggling in places and strong in others.  I'm not perfect.  I'm real.  And that's authentic!