Words To Live By
Once again, Tracie Egan/Slut Machine of Jezebel and One D At A Time knocks it out of the motherfuckin’ park with her latest entry. I’ll let you go read it for yourself because it’s poignant and wonderful but I will tell you something that really stuck with me:
“Anyway, I’m so over not writing because other people would prefer it that way. Not writing about what happens to me isn’t going to make people love me, in the same way that writing about it isn’t going to render me unlovable for the rest of my whore-y life. “
I totally hear where she’s coming from, since being single for the last year or so, I’ve often thought that my Internet presence would be intimidating to people and how no one would ever want to date me because I write about my life in a pretty honest way. And I have experience with this: I’ve totally gotten in trouble for my online journal before. In high school, when I was a little asshole I would complain about my friends (somehow thinking that they would be okay with this? Not sure why.) and I got in trouble. My internet boyfriend, who I met because he emailed me through my journal would get extremely upset when he would read me complaining about him without uh, talking to him first. I got a little better, until I got to college and my roommates had a “house meeting” with me and one of them said she would sue me for slander and it was so traumatic that the only thing I won’t talk about on my blog is housemates. Never again. I also won’t talk about paying work in a public forum, unless it’s in passing but you won’t find any kind of talk about my old employers on the Internet. It’s not worth it. Even now I won’t say it, mostly because it is boring.
However, boys: fair game. Last summer, I got into trouble with VPG over a post I wrote and the Ex got mad at me when I directed my rage towards him getting into a new relationship a week after our break up into a review of his place of work. He wrote me an extremely polite email about how customers were asking him what the drama was. I have since changed it, although I still mention that he works there, but not by name.
My most recent snafu with dragging someone into my treacherous world was of course, Married Dude. Initially, because I didn’t want him to hate me, I wasn’t going to write about it at all and just keep the whole thing off the Internets. But after the weird STD e-mail and after his wife started blowing up my blog stats AND she left a comment on one of my Flickr photos, there was no way I could keep that to myself. And even THAT post, in its confession type way, doesn’t even say that much. There are no real specific details there. The only people who know who it is are the people involved. That entry could literally be about anyone. I half expected him to write me and tell me to take it down, but I think we all knew (me, him, the wife) that denial was futile, we all knew what happened, why cover it up?
What I didn’t tell you guys was that she wrote to me a week after I posted that, asking me to elaborate on something I said, using his dummy email account. I’m almost certain that it was her and not him, because I’m pretty sure he is never even allowed to utter the name “Maria” ever again in this lifetime, much less compose an email to me. I wrote back a one sentence reply.
The e-stalking from her has stopped for the most part. I caught her the other day (I think that IP address is basically ingrained into my memory, like Hurly’s numbers from LOST) and it made me a little sad to think of her still looking on here. The whole thing is going to make a spectacular short story one day.
Anyway, the point, dear readers, is being scared to write the truth never got anyone anywhere. There is so much bullshit on the Internet already, why continue to perpetuate it?
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