The Personal And The Political
Mike Haynes asked about names, specifically what made bloggers “choose to use your real name or not”, while Robert happenstantially mentioned not really “posting a great deal of personal information”, and I thought about what I posted almost a year ago about my name and its status over time.
Diagnosis, I’ve argued, forces something of a retcon and reconsideration of one’s life to that point, and having spent 2017 taking on that new framing and self-context, it makes sense that I’d then take every opportunity I could to re-present how I represent myself to the world.
I’d told the person who diagnosed me that the immediate impact was suddenly having mental boxes to put things in: this is the autism, that’s the anxiety, and the other is the OCD. In a way, this was the same; a sort of Bix box, something I’d built myself to defend against those defined by others.
I also thought about Alexandra pitching in on the the ongoing, rolling effort at convincing people that the new blogging renaissance is on.
i want and wish for more people feel like they themselves can be what they show the world—not just their work or their projects. i want to read your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions of the world as it’s happening around you. romanticize your life; tell me the minute details of your commute—your perception is yours, after all, and i’ve never experienced it before. if it’s common or unoriginal, that’s okay; nobody can tell it the way you can as long as you’re writing it.
(On that new renaissance, I wonder why some people seem to hope that it’s coming, when it’s really already here. What are they waiting on, exactly?)
As ever, all of this puts me in mind of prior posts where I cite Winnie’s imploration that we “normalise being whole persons”, although as I said in Mike’s thread I recognize there are issues of privilege and profession that can impact such a thing.
In all the above light, then, I want to give the last word to Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors, writing in the somewhat different context of art and politics. Not for the first time in recent days, I’m skipping right to the end.
For a long time, part of what drove me as a writer from the third world trying to publish and be seen in the first was the idea that I had to be proof. To be quod erat demonstrandum. I wanted to say to others like me, writers and other artists from the third world without the resources and opportunities that our first-world counterparts have, that this can be done, we can also do this, it is possible. But this work of demonstrating possibility goes so much further than merely overcoming barriers to publishing. We cannot simply want seats at the table. Bring Kafka’s axe with you and plant it in the centre of the table when you get there. There is no more time for compartmentalizing your life, your work, and your politics. Allow yourself to be unpartitioned and whole.
Emphasis mine.