Message in a Bloggle

From the moment I could clutch a crayon until the day I left for college, I started no fewer than 17 diaries.  Not one lasted past three entries.

Not because I was lacking in the self-absorption department.  Not because I couldn't bear up beneath the all those blank pages to be filled.

No, in the oft-repeated battle of Diary-v-Indigo, it wasn't the writing that did me in every time.

It was the rewriting.

Which begs the question: how sick does a 10-year-old have to be to edit her own diary?  (In red ink, no less?)

I couldn't help myself.  Time and again, I'd finish an entry, put the cap back on my pen, and push the journal firmly away, like an overeater proclaiming disinterest in the second half of a pepperoni pizza.

But I couldn't push it from my mind.   I'd gnaw and worry at half-remembered passages the way my sister chewed her fingernails to ragged semi-moons.   I couldn't stop wondering if there weren't a more compelling way to have written the second sentence in the third paragraph.  I'd pause in the middle of brushing my teeth, momentarily paralyzed by the epiphany that the word I'd been reaching for on the second page—the only word, in retrospect, that would possibly do—was "x" rather than "y."

And pretty soon, I'd be tearing back through the defenseless little journal like a psychopath desperate to retrieve his car keys from the body he'd dumped too hastily in a shallow grave.   I'd rip out what I now realized to be only "first draft" pages and set pen to virgin paper, rewriting the entry from scratch and pretending that "x" had come obediently to mind the first time around.

The way it would have for a real writer.

Of course, I'd tell myself, the do-over was a one-time slip, necessary to make up for a false start.  A mistake that would surely not be repeated, now that I'd found my authorly stride.

But I knew better.  And by the time I found myself revising the first several entries—usually for the severalth time—something inside me would hoist a white flag, and the latest journal would quietly join its fallen comrades in back-of-the-sock-drawer oblivion, never again to see the light of day.

Which brings me to this—my first-ever entry in my first-ever blog.

You might think that anyone who so late to join the world's swelling ranks of bloggers must be opposed to them on general principle.  But the truth is, I like blogs.   Other people's blogs, I mean.  I read them.  I comment on them.  I even subscribe to a few.

But I've never felt a burning desire to write one of my own—and given my troubled track record with diaries, it doesn't take years of hypnosis or suppressed-memory therapy to understand why.

Because that's what a blog is, at bottom.  Whatever else it may be—a soap box, a pulpit, a place to share and shape news—a blog is a diary.  You're supposed to fill it with regular, thoughtful entries.  Little packaged bundles of candor and insight.  With the entry date sitting at the top of each, like a birthday cake candle.

Or a tombstone.

Just setting my fingers on these keys is enough to disturb the ghosts of all my previous tortured and neglected failures.  I can almost hear them, clanking restless chains and moaning dusty disapproval, like a serial killer's past victims trying to warn the one in his sights.

But I want to tell them it's going to be okay.  This time really is going to be different.  Because I've finally figured out why none of my childhood diaries survived its infancy:

I didn't let my little brother read them.

In fact, I threatened him with certain death if he even thought about thinking about reading them.  And that, I now realize, was where I made my fatal mistake.  Seventeen times in a row.

Because a writer needs readers.  And a conventional diary rejects them.

I suppose that's not its fault.  A diary can't help being what it is, any more than we can.  And what it is is a closed loop.  A series of letters that you write to yourself, in the most incestuous of pen pal relationships.  Whispered, pointless confessions to someone who already knows all your secrets and shares all your sins—who may not judge you too harshly, but can't absolve you, either.

Letters to "Dear Diary" aren't intended to be read aloud to a transfixed courtroom.  Or made required reading in freshman English classes.  Or unearthed by alien anthropologists in some post-apocalyptic future and used as the sole basis for demystifying human civilization on 20th-century Earth.

Nonetheless, those were the readers I was secretly thinking about—those and countless others—every time I lifted my pen.

And as every writer knows, until you put your work into the hands of your readers, it isn't finished.

Until the umbilical cord is cut, you're still giving birth.

It's not good to be in endless labor.  It exhausts you.  It makes you question the wisdom of your choices.  And it makes your work sound … well … labored.

But a blog not only allows you to cut the cord; it forces you to do it.  Forces you, ready or not, to push your words out into the world to stumble or stand on their own.  You can watch from the sidelines, and try to get it all on video for the grandparents, but whatever happens, happens.

A conventional diary rejects readers.  But a blog invites them in.

It is intended to be read.  Even if it never actually is.

So I've decided to think of this not as Diary Attempt #18, but Blog #1.  And I've decided to imagine it as a bottle, not a book.  From time to time, I'll write messages and slip them inside and then hurl the bottle into a fast-moving sea from the tallest rock on my (no man is an) island.

Maybe the tide will carry them to someone strolling a faraway beach.

Maybe they'll just sink into the depths and become vacation homes for wealthy hermit crabs.

It doesn't matter.  Whether or not they ever reach your hands, they'll have left mine.

And maybe the Moving Finger, having not only writ but also posted, will finally be able to move on.

And isn't that at least half the battle right there?