Confessions of a Sub-SLACKER

A New Year's Eve Reflection

Welp…I haven’t written a post in weeks. And I think that makes me a sub-SLACKER. (And that sentence is an accurate sign of how corny I am at heart.) I’ve been writing daily as usual but I haven’t felt like sharing much. And that’s because none of what I’ve been writing has felt appropriate for public consumption. Even writers (including me) who divulge some painful or private things don’t share most of the stuff of their lives. I’m often surprised that strangers think they know me well because they’ve read my work. They know my artful self perhaps, but the actual self is far too unwieldy for simple narrative expression. Maybe if I wrote, sang, painted, danced my-self a stranger could know me by my work, but even then- I don’t know.

What makes this dilvulged-but-unknown-self dynamic hard to grasp for some- I think- is that our social media lives- i.e. our cybog selves- range so dramatically. For some people they are exhibitions, performance art, crafted images. For others they are reckless spectacles, sometimes shared with poor judgment, or as calls for help, or lonely wailings. They are pretty much all at once authentic and constructed, but how and why? That’s the tricky part. If a person has a very curated public self that might not be the truth of their day to day, but it does tell a truth about that person. What they value, what they aspire, what they fear. On the other hand, if someone is telling all of their business, well that can be a performance- an effort to appeal to the world for some response.

I wouldn’t describe my own social media presence as any of the above. Mine is somewhere in between personal photo album, nerdily speculating (or opining) into the void, and “work” as in the self-publicity labor that goes along with being a writer and a (shudders) “public intellectual.” (I am an intellectual, period. But that term, as vexing as I find it, is connected to the fact that I like to say things to a public beyond the students in my classrooms, so yeah, I say it even with a shudder.) And maybe that’s all part of my subslackeria…

This year has been both terrible and wonderful. Whereas once upon a time, back when I trusted being on Facebook, I shared terrible events and feelings fairly regularly on social media. Now I do that only very rarely. This year it has been especially rare. My avoidance of that kind of sharing isn’t savvy enough to be called self-protective. It is simply that much of my grief I’ve known this year is not ready to be articulated. My heart- our hearts- and hurts deserve to be told in a way that is better than what I know how to say now. And maybe I’ll never know how.

But it is also true that so much of what has been wonderful for this year hasn’t made its way to the public. Indeed, the most wonderful parts have not. Yes, I have posted accolades and achievements for which I am grateful. But I’ve shared relatively few of the moments that made my heart sing. And that’s because I don’t want to live looking at my joy from the outside in. You know how when you have a fantastic day you keep returning to it, savoring it? I love doing that. But if I write it out though, that fantastic day becomes something to be seen. It becomes an artifact that I can’t conjure up in my heart the same way. So I keep most of the sweetness on the inside, and only judiciously tell or post (shudders) about the goodness if and only if telling the goodness has a purpose, if it is a way of telling the world something that bears repeating or knowing.

All of that to say that my subslacker quiet over the past couple of weeks is maybe bringing me towards a lesson about being a writer and even more importantly about being a person. Writing isn’t just about having courage to say the things that are hard to say. It is also about withholding the things that are not for your art. There are no rules about what types of things fall into either category as far as I’m concerned. This is not a point about keeping private things private or appropriateness. Rather, it is a point about being a complete complex person who happens to be a writer. I’m not material. I’m an artist who uses my life as material. So, I want to continue to cultivate a sensitivity- an internal one- about what I take to be for the page and why. And what I keep for those quiet sweet moments before I fall asleep.

Anyway…

I posted a note a little while ago saying that my New Year’s resolution was paring down. I’ve been doing it for weeks, months even. And this morning I gave away another 8 boxes of “stuff.” That’s one dimension of paring down. But another I’m finding through hearing from two sources over the past two weeks (one a Maya Angelou interview, the other from a priest delivering a funeral service) a powerful albeit basic formulation: We don’t come here to stay. The one sure thing about our earthly lives is that they are temporary even if long. And if a person is fortunate enough to live as long as I have (52 years) I think it is a good idea to be clear on what we’re here to do given the transitory nature of this enterprise. And also, to consider what we want to leave behind for those who survive us. A lot of that, for me, is about my relation to others, whether in the flesh or on the page. There are people who I hope remember my words of praise and the light in my eyes when I see them, and those who I hope find answers on the pages I public.

A few weeks ago, two days apart, one person said to me: “you have no trouble saying no!” (while chuckling) and another said “you need to learn to say no.” They were both wrong. I say no quite frequently. But I struggle with it often. Still, I say no frequently because what I say yes to matters. Because the yeses reflect what I came to do. My “no” upsets a lot of people. My “yes” sometimes leads people to take advantage of me. But I choose these commitments with care.

And clearly I’ve been choosing my subslacking ways. But some other ideas-hopefully- are bubbling up that will make their way from my journal scribblings to this platform. See you in 2025.