Greetings again, ducks.
One of the hardest things I’ve set myself out to do is to write something every day, mostly here. Not all that easy; occasionally even Motormouth Me runs out of things to say. So I struggle with it, usually right at the point when a bunch of readers have dropped by in response to some blogvertising I’ve done.
Way to keep up the momentum, C.L.
I’ve been busy with work stuff the last few days and not getting enough sleep. Which explains part of why I’ve been away.
Would that it was the only reason.
I’ve been struggling a bit lately with the consequences of my late-aborning political awakening. (You knew there would be consequences, didn’t you?) Specifically, I no longer seem to be able to keep from alienating people, including people who are dear to me.
I’m not sure what to do about it, either.
The essence of my–enlightenment, let’s call it–has been that I have become acutely, painfully aware of my own privilege. This has led me to radically reexamine the world around me and the ways that privilege, mine and others, interact to create this beaten up planet and downtrodden human race.
And I don’t know how to keep quiet about it. I don’t know how to stop seeing, how to stop talking (and let’s face it, preaching) about what I see.
I don’t know, in short, how to just shut up and let things roll over me without it seeming like collusion. That’s in part what I was trying to say in my previous post: that I can’t even watch a muddle-headed B-movie like Uncommon Valor without seeing all the hypocrisies and unspoken assumptions it contains.
And I’m not sure that I even want to stop.
Part of the reason I started the blog is that I wanted to find an outlet for what I was feeling (especially the trans-related stuff) that I could use to keep it from leaking into my everyday life. In that regard, The Second Awakening is an utter failure, because writing about this stuff, digging deeply into my own thought processes, learning about the things going on around me, has only radicalized me even more. (Plus, I’ve become just proud enough of what I’m doing to want to talk about it, which knocks not outing myself as trans into a cocked hat.)
I don’t think of the blog as a failure, of course; I like writing it, I like how I’ve had to confront a lot of my own internalized issues in the course of writing it, I like how I’ve managed to start to come to some conclusions about the world based on the work I’ve done here–work that feels so important to me; maybe the most important work I’ve ever done.
All the same, I wonder about where I am going, where this is taking me. Most of all, I worry that I will go some place that many people who are important to me cannot follow. That as a result of what I am doing, I will end up alone.
Maybe that’s the price to pay. Lord knows I’m used to that kind of thing–transness has always been the gift that keeps on taking.
But I was kind of hoping that I was finally coming home, instead of walking further out into the cold.