I’m a surprisingly private person.
I’ve only started realizing that recently. This may come as news to you, given that I’m blurting this out in a decidedly public medium and have blurted out all sorts of revealing bits and pieces about myself over the past three years that this blog has been alive, and in the decade before that when entire days were noted in great detail on my old Livejournal blog (mirrored here using a slightly more user friendly interface).
It seems, however, that I’ve got very clear boundaries between what I’m willing to let out of my head and what will stay locked up inside. For the past few months, everything that has been going on has been the latter. How can you write about place, about travel, about exploration, when most of the action has either been wholly inside your own head or way too private to blurt out to the world?
Aside from approximately two or three mops and a rough draft of a Wok With Me Baby post about roasted pumpkin parathas (which are fabulous, by the way), I’ve not written anything since I arrived in Bali nearly a month and a half ago and announced my intention to write all about it.
Seminyak! Ubud! Nusa Lembongan! So much one could write about 3 weeks in Bali…
Hell, I took a cooking class in Ubud and carefully documented the preparation of every dish with the intention of publishing a Balinese cooking series: tempeh, satays, spicy green beans, tuna steamed in banana leaf.
I took notes on the seaweed farms and tidal patterns of Nusa Lembongan.
My camera is filled with hundreds of photos that I have yet to even upload to my computer let alone publish. In my head, I composed long, witty, thoughtful paragraphs about things I’d observed, places I’d been. I sent out a mad flurry of selective, detailed photos on Instagram, carefully not referring to anything that happened or to anyone involved.
But still, nothing was written here.
Remember when I wrote about memory and context? Remember how I noted that so much of memory is created, cemented and revised simply by having written about it? And how sometimes it all gets altered and reshaped through hyperbole and omission? The phrase I always use for this is Christmas In London, where what I wrote about for my friends and family (Christmas lights on Oxford Street! Carols! Pretty!) was radically different (but not exactly untrue) from my actual reality (heartbroken, cold, miserable, sick).
I wasn’t ready to craft a Christmas In London level of omission so I wrote nothing at all.
Nothing.
And it’s not for lack of things to write about.
It has been a momentously life altering season with huge shifts in geography, both internal and external. Everything that was true in January is now completely different: job, flat, private life. Rug pulled out from under all of them.
There has been plenty to write about but nothing I actually wanted to write about or was prepared to write about or felt comfortable with making public. And I still don’t. So I’m not going to.
And I’m very aware that these vague allusions to Things That Happened But I Won’t Tell You What They Are make for really crappy blog posts. Places I visited (oh, hey, remember that Bali series of posts that never happened?) and thoughts I had (many, and all quite mad and new and conflicting) have all been too inextricably linked to the Things That Happened to discuss in any detail here, without giving it all away.
At first I thought my Public Sphere Writer’s Block was temporary: a by-product of all my inner tumult, a desire to keep inner upheavals private in order to heal and rebuild in a safe and gentle place. I couldn’t even articulate it in a private journal. Words were lacking. Words felt clunky and insufficient. There was way too much going on. Difficult, painful, life-rearranging stuff.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t document anything. For two months.
See what I’ve done here? I’ve written hundreds of words without actually telling you anything other than the fact that stuff happened and that I didn’t feel like I could write about it.
I am going to publish this post to reintroduce myself to my blog, to you all, to reopen the dialogue of the comments section, to quietly reset the compass to find north again (it has moved, significantly).
Maybe now I can start writing about Shanghai again. I’m certainly seeing it from a radically new perspective, one worth exploring. I’m just not going to talk about everything I failed to talk about up until now. I hope you’re comfortable with such blatant omission.
I shall now resume my extensive hyperbole.
Hello, Shanghai! It’s certainly interesting to be back…
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