Lost Without You

I used to blog with a sense of urgency. It was important to me that I lay my words out in cyberspace. They served a purpose, and even if no one but me read my words, at least I had an intended audience. The audience gave my words meaning and direction; I knew how to phrase my thoughts because I knew how best to communicate to my audience.

But lately, it's not that way. When I blog, I feel like I'm talking to myself. My audience has become Me, and I can't write to Me because it seems pointless. Why communicate to myself things I already know?

My last blog had been a lesson in what blogging could be like. I was amazed when strangers found me on facebook and myspace. Seeing new messages in my inbox filled me with a kind of heightened glee, then gradually felt like living in a glass house. I grew afraid of people throwing stones.

At the same time, I outgrew my persona. No longer in need of any covert barriers between myself and other people - descriptions, titles, statuses - I felt the exterior manifestation of my personality wane. Loud outbursts, hysterical laughter, crude escapades, violent tumults all lost their appeal. They no longer seemed like organic extensions of the person I'd become.

I became more quiet and intense. A know-it-all complex began to brew in me, or rather a strange paradox involving the know-it-all complex: I knew that no one knows everything, and that made me feel like I knew everything.

Then a realization hit. It wasn't everything that I'd learned, but an elusive and eternal truth. I'd come to the point where opposites are enmeshed and bleed into each other, and I understood that everything and nothing really matter. The feeling inferred from this realization was compatible with the little I knew about Eastern philosophy and zen.

It's this paradoxical chasm that typifies my experiences as a philosophy student. We'd sit in class, dissect the mind ramblings of (mostly) old, white men, and come to the conclusion that every viewpoint had a grain of truth, and no one monopolized that particular truth. The real truth, the big truth, involved beliefs that stretched the gambit of thoughts, and it was an uphill battle to figure out where one notion left off and another began.

It's an altogether simpler task to figure out where one phase of life starts and another begins. Sometimes the starting point is a new job, a new love, marriage, children, a break-up, the death of a loved one, realizing that you don't fit into your favorite pair of jeans/that you're gay/that your parents are swingers, being diagnosed with a disease, ending a personality-defining habit or relationship. I had faked my way through life, making up answers and escape routes as needed; I knew that I was a different person when I became certain of what I knew and what I didn't know.

So this blog came into being, and with its growth came the diminishing of my old writer's voice.

I know that it's probably just a matter of getting used to who I've become, but there are parts of who I was that I miss (even though they weren't necessarily healthy). I miss the danger, the excitement, the feeling of not knowing. Now, everything feels sublime; therefore, nothing feels sublime.

All this time, I've worked to hit my stride, and now that I've hit it, I am certain that I much prefer the activity of working towards a goal than I do the achievement of a goal. Perhaps I've known that all along, and I was subliminally and subconsciously delaying the inevitable.

Throughout all of this, I've blogged and maintained a record of who I am and what I've become, and I've come to realize just how important it is to have a target audience, to feel like you're communicating with someone, to have someone specific to want to speak to through your writing... Without that person, those people, that audience: the activity feels empty.

So I'm thinking up ways to feel not so empty. To rock the boat a bit. To feel abrupt jolts of life, instead of a steady stream of it. I guess I'll always be the adventure-seeking, wise-cracking, unconventional hoodrat. That's good to know.