Dialogue

"Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it." -- Virginia Woolf

I'm going to make a confession: Sometimes I don't like to publish my blog. It's not that I don't like to write on my blog. I always enjoy writing blog entries. But sometimes after I hit "publish," I feel kind of down. I don't like feeling that way. In a way, this particularly blog post is for myself, for coming to terms a little bit about why I feel that way, and why it matters.

The Primary lesson I taught this week to my 10- and 11-year-olds was about Matthew 25 and talents. At the beginning of class I passed around a bowl containing little slips of paper with "You have the talent to..." written on them, each listing a different talent. Some were obvious talents, like playing soccer or the violin, and others were more subtle, like being a good leader or understanding people's feelings. Every girl took two, and we talked throughout the lesson about how they might go about developing the talents they had drawn, and why the Lord might want someone to develop such a talent.

Completely by chance, one of the two talents I drew from the bowl was "You have the talent to be a good writer." This allowed me to share with the class some stories about developing talents, because I love to write. Love love love it. I have loved to write from the time I was very young and first discovered that I could form words with my own hand, and that they meant something, to other people. My mom talks about how when I was born, she was determined not to be the kind of parent who pushed her children to do things ahead of their time, before they were ready. She didn't want to teach her kids to read before school. But then, in spite of all her efforts to the contrary, I went ahead and taught myself to read and to write, long before Kindergarten.* It was just something I wanted badly enough on my own.

* Actually, my parents totally played a role in my learning how to read. They certainly didn't push me. Instead, they read to me daily because they enjoyed it and because I enjoyed it, and they provided me with books to flip through on my own, and they gave me the yellow electronic Speak 'N' Spell that I used to painstakingly sound out my first words and stories in the privacy of my bedroom, and they listened patiently and happily when I ran to them to share my newly acquired skill. 


But for all that I have loved writing from the beginning, I feel like it's a talent I've developed only in fits and starts. I wrote stories when I was young, but as I grew older I was always too embarrassed to share them, and found my stories easy to start but difficult to finish. I found myself writing complete works only for assignments, and for a very long time there was a huge disconnect between the writing I loved to do (which appeared in my personal journal, saved on miscellaneous floppy disc files, and inscribed in the back of my school notebooks), and the writing I actually shared with the world.

I started reconnecting my public and private writing selves when I began writing answers to questions on the 100 Hour Board about seven years ago, and then I really reconnected my two writing selves when I shed the anonymity and took up blogging and shared my blog with family and friends. It's not the most professional outlet, but it provides me with purpose and structure and motivation and an outlet for careful creative thought.

But.

The Virginia Woolf quotation above came from some readings from an Independent Study course I recently signed up for, and it really resonated with me when I read it. Resonated so much that I needed to think through it, in writing. It resonated with me because I felt like it explained why I feel the need to write, to write in general and to write on my blog, and it struck me because as I mulled over why it was striking me, it occurred to me that it partially explained why I sometimes find writing on my blog dissatisfying.

I feel like I write largely because I believe everything that Virginia Woolf was saying. I do believe in communicating, in sharing the hidden thoughts. I don't believe in sharing everything to everyone - some things are meant for the world, some for my blog readers, some for family, some for the closest of friends, and a very few things for God alone. But I do believe in sharing. Blogging is one of my ways of sharing, and it always feels like I'm communicating while I write, communicating with purpose and sincerity. But often once I publish it no longer feels like communicating at all.

Once, years ago, I shared my blog with someone I was only just starting to get to know. He then proceeded to read through my entire blog, which was flattering (not creepy, as he initially feared), but for some time afterwards I felt a strange imbalance in the relationship, like he knew me far better than I knew him, and it unnerved me more than I admitted to my friend. When someone reads my blog, it's a bit like I'm communicating without being communicated back to, which means blogging often feels like speaking to myself, or to the void. I put my words out there because I want to share myself, but I share myself because I want to share, and unfortunately blogging is not the best venue for two-way communication. I know people read my blog, but I don't always know if they hear me when they read. Most of the time what I hear in response to my blogs, and sometimes to my most heartfelt or carefully-crafted blogs, is nothing, or very little, and I often feel that I would rather have disagreement or critique than nothing at all.

I don't want you to read this wrong. I am longing a little for dialogue, but not begging for comments, and I love and value the few comments I do receive. I don't my own sometimes-dissatisfaction as something that can necessarily change. I don't know if other people feel the way I do. But I made the choice to use this blog and to use my writing as one of the ways that I communicate these things I want to communicate, and I have to accept the limitations of the medium. And I do hope that sometimes the things I say sometimes provoke my readers to think or to disagree or to relate, and that even if I don't see that side of the dialogue, that it's still there.