the plight of the personal essay
Tonight, over dinner, my roommate and I discussed my latest happenings and what I'm going to do about them. She's been an avid supporter of my zine work, partly because she's just next door, where it's easy to offer her the first copy of each new issue I make. She's also been the witness and sometimes forced confidant to most all of my adventures this year, so I naturally treat her opinion with very high regard.
Most all of my work is personal, sometimes excessively so. I've been trying to back up from writing about myself for the last while, simply because it feels a little derivative. I already live in my body 24/7, people in my life hear me talk their ear off all the time, how much more could one take? On the other hand, what greater influence can one's work have than the events that make up everyday life? They'll always keep happening, and there's always something to take away from them.
She, maybe in an effort to comfort me more than anything, let me know that this issue wasn't going to be like the rest. The rest simply reflected on the past, gathered remnants from events that had already come and gone, of no consequence to the paper medium before I decided to write them down. This issue, however, would be born from a deliberate effort to create something for it. The content, from start to end, would not have happened had it not been for the desire to make a zine out of it.
I've recently finished a two-week long experiment that I conducted for the February issue of con moto. It started as a joke that slowly spiralled into an oddly intimate look at a lot of personal aspects of my life that I'm now organizing stats about. While the zine was originally going to just be the stats and some funny notes and findings, I'm finding myself compelled to actually treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves. Maybe it's the fact that previous issues have usually been put together in 3 day spans, maybe it's the fact that I finally feel like I'm writing about something worth writing about.
The other plight I have, besides the narcissistic aspect of personal writing, is the bare, vulnerable feeling of sharing it after. Some of my greatest connections and conversations of life have been through sharing things within art that were most definitely TMI, so to speak, however, that same work has also given me some embarrassing moments that will haunt me forever.
My solution, at least for this particular work, is to only keep it in physical form. That is, only for the eyes of my trusted friends and zine people who have already read enough personal things about me to be used to it. I wrote back in December about how I've been doing less digital (ie. blog work, sorry..) writing, and more physical writing and art, mainly the zines. I think I might like to keep that trend up for my more serious work. I like the secrecy, I like the personal touch that goes into licking an envelope closed, in directly handing my writing to someone. Makes it a little less scary even though I'm literally looking my readers in the eye.