It's a Blog Story: Baby, Just Say "YES!"

*[Note: the title of this post is an adaptation of the last line of the refrain of Taylor Swift's song "Love Story".]

On June 9, 2009, I started a new blog called Freedom Diaries. But I didn't tell anyone. In fact, I thought I had selected the blogging options that would keep it out of search engines and the like while I tested the idea and got a feel for it.

I began with a grand proclamation. (Is that an unfortunate hold-0ver from my clergy days--that I tend to make grand pronouncements from time to time? Probably. It was one of my default ways to end an otherwise weak sermon, I must confess--the grand rhetorical, homiletical closing flourish.)

Anyway, back to the story. My first post grandly proclaimed:

Earlier today I decided that sustaining two blogs was one blog too many. Now, at the risk of becoming the poster child for some sort of multiple blogging disorder, I'm starting another one a mere four hours later.

But this one's different. This one, in fact, has already been written. Just not published.

This blog already exists as entries in my various journals--most in spiral-bound notebooks, handwritten in Parker's washable blue fountain pen ink (most of the time); some in bits and pieces in my computer's memory. All that needs to happen is for me to choose and copy journal entries from one format into blog format, and presto! The Freedom Diaries will become a reality.

In the next post I tried to work out my approach, and then I promptly stopped. Totally bogged down in the muck of those old journals. No, that's not quite right. Totally bogged down in justthinking about wading through the muck of those old journals. I really and truly just stopped the blog.

In late July an email from someone I'd never met landed in my in-box. Someone who had somehow read my abandoned Freedom Diaries blog, the very blog that I thought was invisible to internet searchers and surfers. (It turns out I only thought I had chosen those options but never actually activated them!) The email let me know that at least one person out there in cyberspace wanted to hear more about this story. She had even left a comment on my first post: "Please keep writing...reveal more." Music to this blogger's ears and heart.

But for whatever reason I got scared, and went back into hiding. Like the proverbial groundhog, I had actually cast a shadow, had dared to stick my neck out into the light of day and had enough substance to be seen by someone, and back underground I went.

Fast forward several weeks to early September. On September 6, perhaps in the spirit of a new school year starting, I wrote: "I don't exactly know what's going on here, but I find myself wanting to resurrect this blog."

I even wrote two posts on the same day, and then another, then two more, and it seemed as if I was rolling. But I had deliberately once again kept the blog under wraps (or so I thought). I was enjoying just writing in blog form for my eyes only (or so I thought).

But it turns out that some things aren't what I think they are when it comes to Blogger's blogging platform (if that's the right term). It didn't occur to me that certain things that apply to one of my blogs would also apply to another one. And so while I thought I was writing and even "publishing" blogs for my eyes only, some of my followers of Trusting Delight were getting emailed versions of Freedom Diaries delivered to their in-boxes. Which I didn't know until after I had published several totally unguarded, supposedly "private" posts.

Again, I beat a hasty retreat and returned several of the posts to "draft" status, thereby removing them from the eyes of random internet surfers and friends alike. And I felt pretty stupid, really. I even wrote a post about being a "techno-ignoramus with techno-egg on my face." Though I also vowed not to beat myself up over it.

Slowly it dawned on me. There are at least two ways to look at this strange trail of events. One is to see this as a story of my hesitation and timidity and desire to hide, and, yes, my obvious incompetence with certain aspects of blogdom.

The other is to imagine that this is a story that wants to be told, a story whose time has come. Or, to take a more active ownership in all of this, to imagine that for all of my conscious desire to hide the story, to test it out and then retreat, twice, there's another part of me that must really want this story to be told and that really wants me to be the teller of it because I alone can be the teller of it and the creator of it.

Maybe it's kinda like old Jeremiah, who tried to refrain from speaking for and about God, and discovered that when he did so, "there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." Maybe. Some kind of cyber-Jeremiah. (Hmmm....interesting idea, a blog written as if the blog of Jeremiah, or Jesus, or Mary... I'm sure someone's done that already. You think?)

Except in this case it's not a matter of speaking for God (I tried that for 22 years); it's about speaking for myself. To step out of the shadows and into light, out of hiding, to become visible, finally, as I tell the unfolding story of my journey from living by the rules and "being good" to living (more or less) free and being happy, from Episcopal priest to free-lance human being.

I am quite sure that this is not going to be a chronological account of my story. It will swing back and forth from present to past and back again. I don't plan to try to make this a smooth and seamless narrative, but to let it emerge as it will, blogpost by blogpost. As I've said before, I'll just have to give it a go and see what happens. And I always reserve the right to adapt and change as I go along.

To check out the Freedom Diaries click on the hyperlinked name (right back there, earlier in this sentence). For the next little while, I will probably keep linking from this blog to that to be sure you find me!

No Disguises

David is sometimes right; actually, David is often right, especially when it comes to my psyche's well-loved traps. After being married to me for 21 years, he can sniff out my favorite traps from quite a distance and warn me when he thinks I'm walking right into one. Sometimes I listen, and sometimes I don't. (And after all, he may want to spare me the agony of learning the hard way for the 99th time, but at some point I really do need to figure things out for myself, although God knows most of us need all the help we can get from people who love us!).

The most recent example in question concerns my writing and this blog. From time to time I make noises about wanting to write an honest, unvarnished account of the journey that brought me to renounce my ordination vows last April, after 24 years as an Episcopal priest, the only "professional identity" I've ever had. And David has said things like, "Why make it so big? why tell yourself you have to write a book? No one should write a book unless they absolutely MUST! Why don't you just start to write about it in your blog? Why make your blog one thing and your "book writing" another?"

Well, I have my days when I think he's absolutely right, and then I have my days when the public exposure side of a blog makes me a little bit queasy. I love the fact that on any given day, I might hear from SOMEONE who has read my blog and gives me quick feedback. It is wonderful to know that people are actually reading it and getting something out of it. But I also worry that if I started writing a truly honest account of my journey, I might start getting some negative feedback, might start shocking some people and losing my fledgeling readership, and that would convince me to stop writing. Or at least that even imagining that I could stir up some really negative feedback might make me less honest and bold in my writing. (Hmmm, sounds like a garden variety voice of fear, with maybe a little valorous discretion mixed in...)

I had a wee small breakthrough last week that is prompting me to just go ahead and blog it all anyway. I was rehearsing in my head the two most feared and anticipated criticisms I have of my writing (besides that it might be considered blasphemous, or something--but hey, what can they do to me? I'm not a priest any more!). I really really don't want people to think my writing is either BORING or SELF-INDULGENT. Especially the "self-indulgent" one...somehow that one really gets its claws into me. Partly because I know two or three people who have leveled that charge against Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. (I found Under the Tuscan Sun to be kind of whiny and self-indulgent; I found Eat, Pray, Love to be honest. Maybe it's because one was fussing about a house in Tuscany--such a "problem"--and the other was talking about big internal issues in ways I found helpful.)

Back to my breakthrough: So I have these twin fears: that people will think my writing is "boring and/or self-indulgent" and that I might fail. And it occurred to me that if some people find Eat, Pray, Love to be self-indulgent and I liked Eat, Pray, Love (and clearly a lot of other people do too; more on that another time), then perhaps having my writing considered "self-indulgent" was not such a bad thing! Maybe it could even be seen as a hidden compliment! And boring? The surest way to be boring is not to tell the truth, to pretty things up too much. There are way, way, way too many pretty-sounding (and holy-sounding) books and blogs out there. The last thing I want to do is to write another!

And then it also occurred to me that if I'm simply setting out to write and to tell my story, then the only way to fail is NOT TO WRITE IT. I never said anything about writing a runaway best-seller that sits atop the New York Times list for weeks on end, although maybe that's not such a bad idea. I just said I want to write and to tell my story. 

And just so you know, that means I want to write it down, at least most of it, and I also hope to be able to speak it, in public, in a variety of venues. (After all, I do have 24 years of public speaking practice.) And I'd love for any and all ideas of where to do so as things unfold.