the future of supernouveau

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this blog—far more time thinking about it than actually writing for it—and trying to figure out what to do with it.  I’m not entirely certain that it still deserves to exist, after all, in case that hasn’t been apparent from my recent habit of multiple-month absences followed by flurries of short, inconsequential posts more akin to long Facebook status updates than anything really worth writing.

I tell myself it’s a matter of a lack of time, which I know isn’t true anymore, as I recently quit teaching and have spent the last month unemployed. Yes, I’ve been busy, but an entry takes half an hour to write, and I’m not so busy that I don’t have a spare half-hour every day or two.

I tell myself it’s a matter of focusing my energies in the right places.  For the last month, that’s been my beast of a thesis, which spent far too long languishing in a sad little cobwebbed mental closet.  And yes, I’ve made substantial progress in said month.  But before that it was teaching, and before that it was planning a wedding.  And you know what?  The number of hours I’ve clocked farting around elsewhere on the Internet or going through my Netflix queue or fretting about existential post-academia questions during those times suggests to me that my energies are often directed toward plenty of absurd places.

I tell myself it’s a matter of an Internet shift, by which I mean that I don’t feel that I can compete in an image-driven Internet that moves so fast.  Things feel so different compared to when I started blogging in 2004.  I’m not the taking-pictures type; I’m not comfortable traipsing around with a camera in hand; I can’t take a decent photo to save my life (just call me Ol’ ShakyHands McCrappyCamera).  And I stop myself from writing the massively long text-based posts that I used to because it doesn’t feel like that’s what anyone wants anymore (tl;dr, right?).  But that was never what it was about, anyway—Supernouveau has always been a personal thing, it’s never really had a point or even a distinct point of view, and it has never really adhered to the defined rules of “What a Blog Should Look Like/Do/Be.”  And besides, I could address half of this sense of image-necessity by switching hosting sites if I really wanted to.  And in terms of the Internet moving fast, in terms of feeling like “what’s the point of posting links when everyone can find them on content-aggregate sites”—well, I’m just being facetious when I use that as an excuse, because my favorite blogs constantly post links and photos and show me things I love but have never seen.  It’s kind of the point.

So then I tell myself that it’s because my life is more boring than it used to be, or because my life is better than it used to be and I’m less in need of this kind of outlet.  But my life isn’t boring.  I had an interesting job up until a month ago.  I just got married.  I moved to an area just outside a new city and am getting acquainted with a more urban sort of life.  My husband and I are in the process of buying a house in said city.  I have new friends and new hobbies and new experiences.  And yes, I will grant that my life is better than it used to be, and I enjoy being part of it more now and that leads me to feel less inclined to write than when I was overwhelmingly lonely or bored or confused or angsty, but that shouldn’t stop me from writing.  I know I should write more, should chronicle these lovely things so that I can remember them as well as I can remember (with the help of diaries and this blog) the silliness of teenagerhood.

And then I come to the real problem, which is privacy.  And that’s the one that’s really true.  I got scared of getting Dooced, so writing about my job was out.  (And, frankly, it should be—most of the really fascinating experiences that you encounter while teaching are and ought to stay confidential.)  I got scared of someone I know somehow finding the blog; I’ve said it a million times, but I’ve always identified with Gertrude Stein: “I write for myself and strangers.”  I got scared of the permanence of the Internet, the troubles inherent with posting your life and your opinions for the public.  I didn’t like the idea of people seeing my face or knowing too much about my life.  (But isn’t that the point of blogging—letting people know about your life?  Ay, there’s the rub.)

And something happened, something that changed the way I felt about trust and privacy and speaking and silence, something that made me feel that I was walking on eggshells all the time, that I couldn’t speak about my own experience without fear of judgment or disbelief or dismissal.  And it’s funny, because more than a year after the incident, it’s stayed with me and affected the way I live, the way I write, the way I blog, not because of what physically happened, but because of the way I was treated afterwards.  It became the proverbial elephant in the room every time I sat down to Supernouveau, and it was completely and utterly stifling.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with Supernouveau, whether I’m going to keep trying to make it work, whether I’ll revamp my attitudes and revamp the blog and make it into something worth reading again.  Maybe I’ll just let it die, as I’ve been so tempted to do.  Maybe it has done what it was supposed to do—it got me through high school and gave me something to do at a Bondi blue iMac when I was sixteen years old.  And perhaps it’s time to let it go.

But I really don’t think so.