Why I Stopped Blogging

Look. I'll be honest-- I'm not everyone's cup of tea.

Once upon a time, a few years ago, I had something every writer dreams of: I had a project that was going kind of ok.

It wasn't taking off or anything, but people liked it. I was getting a couple thousand views on my best posts, which is about 1,990 more than I get on the average piece of fiction I release. People were commenting. People I know in reality were telling me they enjoyed my writing, and that felt good.

Sort of.

But it wasn't real.

See, I came up with a strong narrative voice for my blog. I talked about my kids, about motherhood. I made it funny. I tried to inhabit a persona-- a funny, relatable, realistic woman that people enjoyed. And the thing is, I was that person. Once upon a time, I really was. I think. At least partially. But the truth was, I wasn't surprised that people liked that woman. After all, I'd been perfecting her for years. Decades. Ever since I got the message that the real me? Not really that likable. A little weird, a little moody. A little much.

A strong cup of tea.

This voice wasn't that different, just a little softened. A lump of sugar in the cup of tea that is me. A little funnier.

But when I had a baby, in reality... it wasn't funny. Nothing about it was funny. Nothing about it was cute. I was suicidally depressed, and desperate not to let anyone see it. The shame was almost as crushing as the grief that haunted me for no discernible reason. I tried to hide behind that familiar persona, tried to cling to it, but it crumbled way too quickly.

I had already lost the voice for my writing blog. Now I lost the voice of my parenting blog. I lost those voices, because I stopped being those people. I lost the capacity to pretend. And when I wrote as myself, as my honest self, people just... didn't respond the same way. New me wasn't really that energetic or appealing. New me was like a freshly skinned peach, damp and awkwardly fleshy. Vulnerable. Practically begging to be sliced apart.

And the truth is, that's actually not new. That's a tale as old as Emily. I was born into this world skinless, an uncomfortably permeable membrane. I feel it all. I seem to make other people feel it, too, and they really don't like that. "Balk" is the word that comes to mind.

While some people spent their childhoods getting into trouble, making friends and mistakes, I spent mine learning how to avoid making others uncomfortable. How to manage pain, anger, awkwardness, expectation. Figuring out how to hide my intelligence, because it made people feel stupid. Learning how to hide my pain, because it made people feel guilty. As a fat girl going through puberty in the late 90 and early aughts, I picked up the skill of putting myself down, so that other people didn't feel like bullies when they did it. I studied the art of the self-deprecating joke.

If you're the set-up, it hurts less that you're also the punchline.

Humor is such a classic way to release tension. But this thing happened, and actually, I stopped caring if people feel tense. Suddenly (and I really do mean suddenly, like shockingly fast), I had FOUR babies relying on me. Other people started to fall off my radar. Their discomfort, their tension, started feeling like a "them" problem. I started resenting the way everyone had come to expect me to wrap every painful truth in a soft gel covering of humor and optimism. A skin, of sorts. That thicker skin I'd been making for myself since childhood.

Suddenly, I just wanted everything to go ahead and hurt.

So I don't write that blog any more. And what I do write, it's sometimes weird and uncomfortable and hard to get through. And yeah, I get how that kinda sounds like I'm every terrible dude named Todd in your MFA program.

They say write to market, write what you know, write for your audience. But all my audience has ever wanted me to be was a quiet, gentle, modest woman. A kind little girl, a good student, who grew into a diligent woman, a faithful wife, a blessed and humble mother. And I have always done those things, and I am that person, and I'm also not that person at all. I'm also defiant, and I'm angry, and I'm spiky, and I'm ten thousand miles away, on another planet, fighting tentacle aliens and falling in love with bog monsters. I don't know how to fit all of that into a Mommy Blog.

I wouldn't want to, anyway.

I don't want to be Louisa May Alcott, abandoning genre dreams because all the publisher wants from me is Women's Fiction. I want to be Todd from your writing class, who takes too much class time and compares himself to Hemingway and refuses to edit. I mean, if Todd is allowed to be Todd, can't I be Todd too?

Probably not. I doubt Todd ever asked a hypothetical audience for permission to be annoying. Todd's just out there living his best life.

I miss the people I used to be, sometimes. And sometimes I don't. I think life is really long, and you have time to be a lot of people. And you don't owe anyone else a watered-down, more palatable, cup of tea. You don't owe anyone cream and sugar. I hope, every day, that I get the courage to just steep. To just be whatever kind of tea I am. I hope it for all of us. I wish us all the confidence of a Todd.

I'll keep writing my weird little stuff for the rest of my life, no matter how views I get, no matter how many people ask me to write something different or be something different. Because I've got a taste for myself, now. It's an acquired taste, and I've acquired it. I'm my own cup of tea.

Be your own cup of tea.