When I first started writing Big Blogs, it was my way of sharing deeper and speaking truer.
I’d been doing that in writing my first book, but I was yet to share these more intimate admissions with a wider net.
I was anxious because these were yucky parts of me. The ugly bits that resented, worried, avoided, overate and slopped around in a pool of negativity.
The first Big Blog, It Was Like A Death, was a hot-faced, gut-gurgling account of a nasty friend breakup. The breakup was a second time around experience, but this time it was rough. I didn’t take the high road and the words that came back to me were so damaging they jangled around inside me for years, inflaming my most insecure pockets and making me wonder if all the horrible things I’d always thought about myself were true.
But I kept writing about the experience, which mirrored the stages of grief one experiences with the actual death of a friend or loved one. I’d read each one aloud to The P.I.C. and catch him wincing or visibly uncomfortable at parts where I let myself sink low and write what I really meant—not the spiritually-tinted, lesson-learned perspective, but how I was actually feeling and what I was still working through and obviously not over.
The Friend Breakup Series
I shrunk knowing that I was writing about myself in an unappealing way. What I’d hidden and controlled and manipulated for so long was now exposed, my high-vibing image tarnished. I was making myself human and didn’t know if I’d ever be able to be that real on a larger scale. So I kept posting these blogs on Medium for about a year, where no one knew me and the followers I did have were stragglers from eight years prior that had probably evacuated the platform long ago.
When I wrote Cheeseburger In The Dark, a friend admitted that it concerned them. I had to explain that these writings reflect a moment in time, and yes, my emotions could plummet into the abyss at times, resulting in self-destructive behavior. I wasn’t cutting or shooting heroin between my toes, but when life felt hopeless, like it was never going to change, I sometimes found myself in parking lots eating fast food. The days of hitting up every joint on four corners, charging 60 bucks to my credit card and gorging on a grease buffet were long, long gone, but the feelings remained. Sometimes I’d engage in a shade of that old coping mechanism but the intensity had dulled to, what looked on the outside like eating a single, unhealthy meal, and the gaps in between what was more like a splurge than a binge grew wider until it was a pop-up in my life, not a common occurrence. But these were the ugly bits. The admissions that were true to my experience, and however infrequent, were both worrying and discomfiting to those around me.
I realized that was the point. Because somewhere out there, someone is bingeing. Or cutting. Or shooting heroin between their toes. And if I don’t have the courage to say it plain, I cap a lid on my shame until it festers into more of the same. If we were all a little more honest about what we really go through when we think no one’s watching, we’d be shedding addictions left and right. We wouldn’t have to shroud ourselves in a cloak of anonymity or splinter ourselves into designated groups to admit our uglies.
We could just be humans that fuck up, regularly.
Isn’t that learning? Growing?
45 posts later, I’m getting somewhere.
Past sneaky cigarettes following a bottle of wine. Past a bottle of wine. Past cheeseburgers in the dark and the shame of painful repetition. Past toxic relationships, even though they were wonderful in ways, too. Past hiding who I really am and what I go through.
Not every blog is a trigger warning of epic proportion but each one is a sliver of my soul laid bare. A real part of me, honestly released. An aspect of my spirit set free.
After a year of writing what only a few friends and randos witnessed, I’ve cast the net wide and unleashed my ugly bits on the world.
I can’t say for sure that only good will come from it, but on my end, I only stand to benefit.
The rest is YTBD. Yet to be determined.
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