The year of living dangerously...

What does it say about me that I'm already considering deleting this blog? Much that I already knew: I have trouble with self-exposure and with following through on writing projects of all kinds, particularly if there's no one depending on me. But it also makes me recognize the conditions under which the blog seemed like such a good idea, conditions that are temporarily suspended right now.

I have spent the last year living in a very remote spot, to which we moved so that my husband could have his turn pursuing a career that he cares about. The idea has been that I would spend the year "finishing my book" while he would acquire some job experience that he would then be able to use to find desirable work back in the big city on the other coast where my job awaits my return (and where we have a house and friends and family). But at the back of both our minds has loomed the possibility that we might stay in this remote place, where my husband has finally found work that is satisfying to him, where there is a wonderful public school system, where we can live quite comfortably on one academic salary, and where I can perhaps finally figure out what I REALLY want to do with my life. While I'm the one with the tenured position in a desirable city, it turns out my husband, who has only now been able to get an academic job, is a much happier academic than I have ever been.

For much of this year off (and we've committed to next year as well), I have felt lucky to have a break from teaching, to have time to read and think and write, and especially to have more time than usual to spend with my daughter. But I have also been lonely, and increasingly anxious about my career, particularly as the months went by and the "book" did not show signs of getting written. In the midst of this unproductive anxiety, I've felt more and more adrift, and drawn to the somewhat dark fanatasy of embracing this drift and quitting my job, cutting ties to my prior life and starting anew in this small town where nobody knows much of anything about me.

It was in this mood that I began to read blogs, and to be drawn to this alternative "public sphere" that seems to include so many intelligent, thoughtful voices crossing the boundary, which in my "real life" seemed so uncrossable, between academia and the world outside it. Reading blogs has become part of my daily life, and to some extent has alleviated both my loneliness and my frustration with academia, giving me new ways of thinking about what is important to me both socially and intellectually (if that makes any sense). I decided, a mere two weeks ago, to begin writing my own blog in part because I couldn't resist it: I wanted to be part of the conversation, and to develop a new voice.

Right now I am back on my home turf, where my family joins me tonight for a month-long working vacation before we head back for year two in the middle of nowhere. I'm around family and friends, I've presented my work at a conference and will be doing some work with colleagues in the next few weeks, and so that space in which I found myself drifting, being drawn to the blogosphere's conversations and to alternative visions of my future, is being filled back in with my normal life. I haven't stopped reading my favorite blogs (and can't imagine doing so) but I feel less compelled to join in the conversation, to rise to the challenge of finding my own voice outside or beyond its usual frequencies.

We'll see what happens in the next few weeks. My internet access will be spotty, as we move about from one housesitting situation to another. But writing this post has made me feel like I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet.

Separation anxiety

Tomorrow I get on a plane for the other side of the country, where I will attend and give a paper at a conference, visit family, and be away from my toddler daughter for one week, which is 5 nights longer than I've ever been away from her. While my paper is still only half written, I find I am much more anxious about this separation than about potentially embarrassing myself in front of my colleagues.

One reason it's hitting me so hard, I think, is that this week will surely result in her finally giving up what around here we affectionately call "na-na." Yes, my almost two and a half year old still starts and ends her day at momma's breast, a state of affairs that I did not foresee back when I righteously asserted my intentions of nursing her for a full year, as per the AMA's recommendations. Don't get me wrong, we are most certainly ready for this next milestone. When your toddler begins to refer to your boobs as her property ("I want MY na-nas") and to assert her independence in the process ("I can do it myself!" she protests, pulling up my shirt), the bonding experience loses a little of its former warm-fuzzy glow. That said, I will nonetheless miss, and I am already tearily mourning the loss of, what have been some of the loveliest moments of my life.

Been there, done that.

I just--somewhat belatedly I now realize--did a blog search for the word "margins" and realized that my blog name is SO. TOTALLY. NOT. ORIGINAL.

And you know what? I ain't changing it.

Talk therapy

I guess these first postings will dwell on what it is I'm doing with this here blog. So far, it's felt a little like the few therapy sessions I've had: a wise-seeming therapist asking me simple questions; tongue-tied me in a panic, trying to answer in a way that is both true and somehow articulable, eventually saying something that's only a shadow of either.

Right now, my therapist is asking: why are you so afraid to draw attention to your new blog?

Good question. It's not that I don't want readers; clearly my starting this blog is about wanting to connect with others. But I don't want to ASK for readers, to appear as if I want to be noticed and liked and accepted as legitimate. I don't want to burden anyone with a sense of obligation to read this blog. Who am I to think that anyone would be interested in my musings??? This, of course, gets to the heart of my resistance to publication.

Fuck it. I'm sick of being so damned humble and self-conscious. I'm just going to do this, come of it what may. Maybe tomorrow.

If a tree falls...

I haven't told anyone yet about this blog, or left comments anywhere linking to it. I shouldn't be surprised at how timid I am to make this move. I don't want people to think any of the things about me that I tend to think about myself: that I'm bland, unoriginal, over-wrought, not as smart as I'm trying to be. And so my demons once again rear their ugly heads.

Margins

So I've been rehashing that first post as I've gone about my day, particularly this whole "margin" thing that I decided would define my blog. Mainly, I've been thinking how so not in the margins my life is, at least if one steps back a bit and sees the larger context of centers and margins. I'm a white middle class American, I have tenure at a university in a major coastal city, I am married to a member of the opposite sex, I shop at the Gap (well, I used to anyway). I have time and means to blog. I am squarely in the center, really.

Of course, I am well aware that my center is on the margins of the lives of most people in this world, however much it may influence those lives for better or worse. I also realize that we may be nearing a time when the center I inhabit loses its power to claim centrality. We'll see how much I enjoy living in the margins then.

What I really should say is that I'm writing from the margins of the center. That I'm uncomfortable being at the center of anything, from global to very personal contexts. That I prefer this uncomfortable feeling to what I imagine is the comfort of being squarely on the inside.

Here goes

So, after several months of "lurking"--a word that has begun to describe how I feel, silently sneaking about the blogosphere--I have decided that I too will blog. It's either blog or get off the blog-reading pot, because I no longer want to be just a wallflower. And yet, as my blog name suggests, I still identify as an outsider, an observer taking notes in the margins. This living-in-the-margins makes me, at times, a good reader of the world around me; but it also allows me to avoid confrontation, entanglements, self-exposure, to remain unrepresented in the central plot. Blogging pseudonymously seems like good way for someone like me to begin be a participant as well as an observer.

I cannot say exactly what this blog will become. I will probably be quite self-centered, focusing on the things I am most often thinking about: my ongoing career ambivalence as a humanities professor, the joys and challenges of parenting a toddler, my struggles to remain optimistic in these disturbing times. I do want to keep my attention on the larger contexts that, at least in part, shape my personal world. Like my favorite bloggers (Phantom Scribbler and Bitch PhD come most immediately to mind) , I see no reason to identify myself as this or that kind of blogger, or to promote the idea that thinking about one's personal life should or even can be separated from thinking about larger social, economic, political problems.

But mostly I just feel the urge to write without the usual constraints or expectations and with the knowledge that someone besides myself might actually read what I've written. Writing with the intention of getting published has always been extremely uncomfortable, nay painful, for me. While I have always been told I write well, and have had success publishing what little I actually submit to journals, I remain crippled by self-doubt and what I can only describe as extreme lethargy in the process of getting anything written. Perhaps this pseudonymous blog will free up my writing voice, and help me work through just what it is that's been blocking it for so long.

(One reason it took me so long to start my own blog, I must confess, was my inability to come up with a name for it, which I suppose is a form of writer's block. I like this name, though would not have spelled it with a "y" if the correct spelling had not already been nabbed.)