Being Amber Rhea

I’m supposed to be working on my as-yet-nonexistent AlterNet piece, but instead I’m sitting here typing this. I know I’m making it out to be a way bigger deal than it is. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if I’m all like, “Ooh, AlterNet, big-time internet publication, wowee, zowee, I’d be famous and stuff!” I don’t know if I was ever that particular brand of naive. But for some reason I got a bug up my ass and decided I wanted to try and write something about feminist choices, and how to define them, for a broader audience (insert questionable joke here: “…not just an audience of broads - ha ha ha!!1!”) So I emailed Jill, who is awesome and who also happens to be an AlterNet editor, and asked if they’d be interested; and she said yes, and I said I’d send her something in a few days.

But I’m stressed out about it the way that having a column in my high school newspaper stressed me out. It seemed like a good idea in theory, but when I had to actually get down to it and write something, it was like pulling teeth with myself. I think I ended up only writing two actual columns senior year, and they were both pretty contrived.

And yet I could go home and write ’til my wrist was cramped (and it took at lot more to do that back in the late 90s!) in my journal, scrawl poetry of various levels of emo-ness in my notebooks, type long rambling paragraphs of Opinion in a SimpleText file I kept on my Mac desktop; when I was younger than that, in elementary school, I could fill notebook upon notebook with stories and even what could arguably be called novels (at my parents’ house there are stacks of boxes labeled “Amber’s books she wrote”); and before I could actually write, I was dictating stories to my grandmother at age four.

I guess it’s that I don’t like feeling like I have to follow rules imposed by others? (And yet I’m a stickler for grammar! Ah, I am nothing if not self-contradictory. [I mean, just look at my fondness for parentheses!])

Hence the “I speak my own language” tag you see employed here frequently.

When I was in 4th grade, I won a creative writing contest and they wrote a little blurb about it in the local newspaper. I was quoted as saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a famous author.” It was cute at the time, because I was nine.

…

I don’t want to have to recant on Jill but I think I might. I think maybe this just isn’t the write right (ha, typo!) time for me to try to write something for somewhere other than my blog. I’m sure I’ll try again one day and it’ll come a lot more naturally.

For example, it came pretty naturally with the (never published) op-ed I wrote for the AJC - although I won’t lie, I spent an entire afternoon agonizing about every word and phrase, wanting to get everything right. But the result was, I think I did a bang-up job! Too bad the AJC, apparently, did not agree, but my feelings weren’t hurt; I wasn’t surprised, after all.

…

Tonight I read this post by Melissa, and it brought tears to my eyes. Silly, right? Well, I’ve always been highly emotional and sensitive, so that’s how it goes with me. No making fun.

I’m not sure what, exactly, about the post struck such a deep chord with me - but something obviously did.

I don’t care (that’s a lie; I do care, in spite of the other half of my brain telling me not to - I just try to pretend I don’t [fake it 'til you make it, right?]) what anybody else says; I think there is value in “life-blogging,” living your life online, whatever you want to call it. I might not be able to articulate exactly what that value is, but maybe that’s simply because there aren’t words for some things. But I feel it intuitively, which is how I experience a lot of things… it’s not popular and won’t get people to really believe you, and it sounds like a lot of hippie shit (note the tag), and yet that’s another characteristic I’ve always had: there are things I “just know,” even if I can’t say why.

This kind of writing - and thus blogging - comes naturally to me. The introspection is a huge part, definitely; introspection is kind of a thing of mine, and I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. I am an INFJ to the core. As a side note - this is why it bothers me SO MUCH when, on threads like the latest pushing-200-comments installation at Feministe, people are so free w/ their assumptions that if you haven’t come to the same conclusions as them, then you must not have examined properly. So go, forthwith, and examine your desires! Because obviously you haven’t, otherwise you would realize how bad and wrong they are, and you would sublimate, sublimate dammit! because it’s the right thing to do, otherwise you’re just pleasing the Patriarchy, because that’s all it can ever be about, really; it can’t be about you.

But back to Melissa’s post. -Well, hmm, what do I want to say about Melissa’s post? Actually, I don’t know; but it got me started typing all this.

More to come, perhaps. I think I need to send Jill an email now and apologize for wasting her time.

Hitting “Publish” now.