blog-phobia

I didn’t want to get self-reflexive right away but it is inevitable.
First of all let me tell you that I am doing something illegal by blogging at wordpress since it has been banned here in Turkey. I won’t bother to go into the details. Someone in one blog among thousands of its likes on wordpress supposedly insulted some big shot who proceeded to sue, won and therefore the entire wordpress access has been denied to the entire country. When you try to enter a page saying access is illegal pops up. Of course for those who know it is not at all difficult to go around which I did obviously. But most won’t know or could not be bothered. So I have elected to write on a place where most of my fellow countrymen won’t be able to read. I am not saying I did that on purpose as a kind of twisted “privacy setting’ I am just saying this must mean smtg. As no doubt deciding to write in English, which is neither my mother tongue, nor a language I can claim to have fully mastered. These are all ways in which I both write and don’t write.
Why? Well I am 38 which means all this is not as natural as it is to someone younger as Douglas Adam’s once said any technology that was around when you were born is natural, anything that came when you were 20 is exciting and new and anything that came when you are older than 20 is against the natural order of things. However this is an evasive answer and if it sufficed I would never have started blogging in the first place.
let’s try smtg else. My friend Alisa thinks bloging is self-indulgent, exhibitionistic and narcissistic. Although her area of expertise is documentaries and she likes what is known as “the first person documentary”, she sees no documentary value in blogging what so ever. Now me and alisa seldom agree on anything and never it seems enjoy the same things (weird friendship? not at all!). However I am aware that in this case as in many she represents an important part of my world (the world of intellectuals). Which means I am blogging knowing full well how it seems to people around me.
Then there is this chitchat that is quite in fashion nowadays about the celebrities like Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears and how it must be extremely difficult to put yourself out there as a target of so much negative energy. Showing yourself to the world always has an aspect of taking of your armour and becoming vulnerable. But not as much as hiding in the shadows, and trying to become inconspicuous even invisible, as anyone trying to “pass”, would attest.
Which of course brings me to the psychoanalytic reasons of blog-phobia. My paranoid mother’s biggest dread in the world has always been the written word. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have watched her methodically tear scarps of paper into microscopic bits before they are thrown into the dustbin, scraps of paper that more likely then not contained nothing more incriminating than the grocery list. In fact she tried to avoid committing anything to paper whenever she could. Think what she would think about bloging if she could grasp the concept. (need I bother to tell you she dismisses the entire concept of computers on principle) so no need to wonder why I am not using my “mother tongue”.
But the problem with all of the above: the ban, the intellectual criticism, the fear of becoming a magnet of negative energy and paranoia pure and simple is that they are all exaggerated and they actually buy the claim that you are reaching (or reaching out to) the entire world. More likely no one will read or only a few friends even a few secret admirers but in the end all acts of self-disclosure are pretty much about things that are more interesting for you than they are for others. I know for a fact that what my mom achieves with all this paranoia is to cling on to the belief that her life is smtg that would interest millions of people that people are willing to go through her trash just so they can have a glimpse of her private life.
When you blog the biggest risk you take is to see how unimportant you really are.