a note on note.
With the resurfacing of Note, I want to tell a story.
Before debauchette, there was another blog, which, at one point, fell dormant for about a year. During that year, I was very active with clients, but I was also very isolated. I hadn’t learned to manage the strain of a split life, and rather than lie to the people around me, I pulled away from them. Someone threatened blackmail – I dealt with that by hiding too (the best way to protect yourself from blackmail is to have nothing and know no one). I tried to date and failed miserably. I tried to blog but couldn’t. Writing felt pointless and risky. I became reclusive.
And then, one day, I received a note. From Note. It was a long time ago, but I remember that it was short and sweet and strong, like, “I’m of the mind that you should write again.”
It woke me up.
I realized then that someone else was still reading those few neglected, Ambien-driven posts, and this hint of a connection made me want to write again. When I did, it came out in force, with urgency.
The accumulated presence of strangers – readers and recognition – felt warm to me, and it still does. I might write about a Schroedinger’s fuck, but with that influence of an observer, there is also the sense of a shared connection. It did much to make me feel less fractured, and it did everything to make me feel less isolated.
Note has a new blog now. And he’s written this:
If I hadn’t been writing while I was Working, I don’t know that I would have assimilated sex-work so well into my psychogenic cosmology; but, if I hadn’t had readers, I’m not sure I would have come out in the end nearly so well at all. It’s the privacy that drives you crazy; the compartmentalization, and the loss of perspective.
This is true: the privacy gets to you. I think I wouldn’t have come out so well in the end (am I near the end?) either had it not been for the blog. It offers a very real connection, if from a distance, and it offers a place to allow those two selves – one shielded from friends, the other shielded from clients – to come together. When Note encouraged me to write again, I realized this.
*
Note, you wrote:
And what I realized while I was coming home, worked over and worked in, my body a haven of figurative track marks, half-moon divots and hickeys, that whatever I had been up to as a prostitute, and all those explorations that led me into climates distant as well as personal, rooms so little and far away; places so strange and extrasolar: that I hadn’t left any of it behind. I am basically still a hooker, just not a working one.
When I’m through with my own extrasolar travel, I’ll join you there.
Congratulations on your new phase.
x
Note sounds lovely. There really is a strange comaraderie in blogging. It’s both arms length and intimate or something. I don’t know, but it offers a fresh spin on the age old rules of contact. I’ll read you for as long as you’ll allow us to.
The Stones had a point then: ‘we all need someone we can lean on’. We love your blog! Lean on us anytime you want….
I went through similar. I was afraid to write, afraid of what would come out of me, and all I wanted to do was hide.
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”
Anais Nin
This pretty much says it all.
i see i’m going to have to go and check out note’s blog.
wallflower: thanks for putting that into words… i was trying to find that in my head but not. it’s exaclty that, an utterly intimate communion with strangers. it starts to get weird when the two of them mix.
i will say that i’ve also found that over time the compartments between my polite blog/life and my not so polite blog/life are eroding a little at a time. i told a few friends about badinfluencegirl so they could tell the blog if i got hit by a bus and then several of them started to read it.
i was like what?
anyway i have to say that my blogs keep me sane. somehow in the making an essay out of them they are freed from the place that i keep things that bother me. or at least they are clarified and heading toward understanding if not resolution.
i’ve never successfully kept a journal, thank goodness for blogs!
To say my ears are burning is a bit of an understatement.
There’s nothing like being honored by someone you honor.
Thanks, love. For the past while, my sense has been that you and I have occupied a very similar place, and it’s the only magic the Internet has gifted us, at the end of the day: strange souls finding each other with words, in a world where words are supposedly dying.
I love your writing.
xo.
Dead flag blues by GSYBE : this is so mysterious
this song is one of my favorite. It scarres me and makes me so sad at the same time. It is like a deep dive in cold fear. Love it