In 2006 when the news of Diane Brimble’s awful death aboard a cruise ship hit the newspapers, I was so disgusted with the coverage that I wrote an email about it and sent it out to all the people on my email contact list. Someone suggested I start a blog to disseminate my views. I figured out how to start one shortly thereafter: Mersigns.blogspot.com.
I haven’t used my blog to generate advertising revenue. I don’t regularly update my photo and profile. My blog does not function as a curated reflection of my life. I’ve never worried about an audience. I am an individual whose issues, problems, insights count for very little in a world where some are suffering, others do all they can to help, and most are too busy to do anything but live their lives as best we can.
My most recent post drew a response from people who interpreted it correctly as a cry for help. But this has not been the driving purpose behind my posts. My blog has been an outlet for me when I have had something to express to the world, and nobody to talk to.
As a blogger, I have been neither journalist, nor academic. My writing style upsets some people. There are reams written to support different kinds of journalism, but I choose to align with a Whorfian viewpoint. As writer, I am part of the world I write about. My experience of the world is formed by how I write about it. I’ve never claimed objectivity.
I have not posted everything that I’ve written. I’ve started, completed, and set aside numerous fictional works over the years, beginning well before the advent of my blog. Before the graphic novel was a thing, I started developing the plot, dialogue, and panels for a comic about someone trying to get pregnant outside a heterosexual relationship. I’ve composed the better part of more than one novel in verse. During 2020, I wrote a series of imagined conversations between me and the Queereye crew, as though they were helping me to transform my life. I documented my family’s fortnight of hotel quarantine with a daily blogpost shared via Facebook.
My lawyer has asked me to consider what it is about posting on my blog, that I can’t get out of journalling or communicating with friends privately. It’s a valid question. Blogging has been my way of documenting and processing my experiences. I rarely have opportunity to speak unmasked with others about the impact of my experiences upon my inner world. I have assumed that if someone did want to talk with me about something I had posted, they would. For the most part, nobody has.
I’ve referenced before, Anne McCaffrey’s story Dull Drums, (published 1977, by Del Rey Books, Get Off the Unicorn). In McCaffrey’s imagined future, the breaching of citizens’ private digital storage is of major concern, not because of identity theft or some other nefarious commercial, criminal intent, but because it opens citizens up to ridicule and social humiliation. My observations about the casual, creative ways that many people interact online, is that our digital lives tend to be quite public. While it is horrifying that cyber-bullying, trolling and other forms of abuse have increased in prevalence, I have always asked myself before posting about me and my life, “what could I lose by posting about this, and what would I gain by hiding it?”
I have been defiantly open about my life. Now, as I am challenged about this, I feel conflicted. Am I justified for considering myself worthy of a voice when I do so in direct opposition to others, who want me to sit down and shut up? Is there any difference between yelling into a sealed echo chamber, and being ignored, silenced, and censored? Who is harmed by my posting my point of view, particularly when the things I post usually go unnoticed?
The spite with which I am being forced to shut down my blog is evident to me, no matter how my lawyer calmly reassures me that her job is to look out for my interests and take the sting of emotion out of the injunctions.
In 2022 I find myself immersed in grief for the loss of so many aspects of my life. It is hardly surprising that the impact of losing my blog feels like another death blow. But if I continue to blog, I risk losing my parenting rights.
