Being Amber Rhea

During the final weeks of 2007, I was involved in some fairly nasty online drama (mostly not on blogs, which is why a lot of you may be scratching your heads and wondering what to search for on Technorati). I put up this post, this post, and this post alluding to said drama. I haven’t written anything extensive about what went down because the thought of doing so still feels too emotionally draining.

But I learned some important lessons during those weeks. First and foremost, I learned (more) about who I can and can’t trust, and in whose presence I should or shouldn’t open virtual veins. I wrestled with the concept of having a strong sense of self, and remembered the words of my therapist when I lived in Athens: “If you’re afraid what you’re going to do is ’selfish,’ do it. Because chances are, in your case it’s not,” and the words of my therapist when I lived in Texas: “I’m surprised to hear you weren’t raised Catholic, because you carry around an awful lot of guilt.” I battled between the inner voice that seems to always know, the one I should trust more often; and the inner voice that constantly second-guesses the first one.

I was called a lot of names, but the strangest one I was called was “liar.” I still don’t understand what I lied about (or what people perceive that I lied about). In fact, I was doing the opposite of lying; I was taking risks, opening veins, and making myself vulnerable. All of it was scary to do, but I thought it was an important exercise in breaking down defensive walls I put up around myself - and what better place to take such risks than in [what I thought was] a “safe space” among friends, allies, and generally interesting people. Unfortunately what I learned was that those walls should stay firmly in place, other than with the select few for whom the walls were already down anyway.

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this, but look: as I said in comments on a friend’s blog recently, for me blogging has always, fundamentally, been about feelings and emotions all that other hippie shit. That’s how I approach things, it’s what has worked for me throughout my life, and it’s what helps me keep a modicum of sanity. To use a small specific example, it’s why I don’t and never have labeled this blog a “political blog.”

Some people deride so-called navel-gazing, but for me, that’s what makes blogging great; when the walls come down, even just slightly, and you see a part of the person (not just an issue or a product or whatever)… it’s those moments that open a pathway for forming some seriously strong connections. And ya know, it’s really no different from how things work in meatspace.

Whenever I get all weirdly existential about stuff and have one of those hated “What does it all mean?!” moments or a bad case of the “what-ifs,” what I always come back to is this: It really doesn’t matter what it all means, in terms of there being some higher, universal meaning or something; what matters is that we’re here, now, alive, and we might as well make the most of the time we have. Or as my grandmother put it a few weeks ago, “You should always enjoy yourself when you can, because you never know what might happen to you.” Why would you want to do anything else?

I know there’s no unifying point to this post, but I just wanted to get some thoughts out. Oh, one other thing…

Vaguely related side note: I understand what Mistress Matisse is talking about. As I write this, I can practically feel the heavy breathing of commenters with their itchy typing fingers, just dying to tell me how this is all so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. As if I don’t know that. For example, when I was in the emergency room with my dad on Christmas Eve, you can rest assured it was nowhere in my mind. And this isn’t even touching on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle, or little everyday epiphanies.