Kimbaland, 2005
On writing in public and taking my own advice. Originally posted January 4, 2020. If someone could have told me what was in store for that disaster of a year, would I have wanted to know?
It was early 2005, and I was about to get married. I had moved in with my husband-to-be, and closed my catering business as we prepared for our move to California—the first of many moves that were to come. There was so much change to consider, and I had so little ability to take any time out to process it, that I felt like having a place to write publicly would allow me, maybe even force me, to make that time. Maybe I’d connect with people who had faced similar life changes, and we’d share insights. As a longtime and faithful journaler, I was already a confident writer, so the idea of sharing my writing with the world didn’t terrify me.
So I embarked on the project that became known to a handful of readers as Kimbaland. It started out as a typical personal blog—things I was planning to do, how I felt about them, and what I hoped to accomplish. But as I explored the blogosphere (does anyone use that term anymore??!?) and began reading the work of other women putting their lives online, I quickly realized that even if I never talked about myself online again, I could fill my blog with commentary on the zeitgeist as I saw it: mostly, that women’s voices were being minimized as chick lit, mommy blogging, oversharing, navel gazing and pointless frippery that was beneath consideration of serious (male) writers. As I mulled this infuriating information over, I was also being slowly immersed in the life of a military spouse, one who was nearly 40 and unused to playing second fiddle to someone else’s career and location demands. And then the run-up to the 2008 election began, my husband got deployed for the first time, and I had to quit a good job to move again.
I got angry.
This anger was good for my writing. I wrote almost daily, and through my rant-based updates I connected with other progressive voters who were horrified by Sarah Palin, other military spouses who were scared to death about the wars and the resulting uptempo deployment rotations, and other women who were facing the patronizing criticism leveled at them by the online public. So many think pieces were published about the unseemly oversharing the world was being exposed to by these self-absorbed women who dared blog about motherhood, marriage, their bodies, their thoughts, their opinions. Lena Dunham was years away from making her debut, everyone was still friends with Tom on MySpace, and Flickr was how we shared photos. The world had no idea what was about to happen to it.
In the meantime, I kept blogging. I was never widely read, but I had an active, engaged audience who I looked forward to interacting with every day. Despite my smallish readership, I still got my share of mansplaining comments and “how dare you not love the Navy”reactions. I didn’t let it stop me from putting my writing out there, though. I blogged about the election, about foreign policy, about blogging, and about how much military life was wearing me out. I kept writing through my father’s final illness, through losing my beloved dog, Pokey, and through our fourth move, this time to Germany. And then I stopped.
I thought I was making a considered decision: that a complaint-based communication style wasn’t the best way forward for me as a writer. I decided to try a more studious approach, and try my hand at a voice that I thought was still my own. (It wasn’t.) My writing took on a forced quality I still can’t quite pin down, all these years later. I made the mistake of classifying what was actually a reaction to how I was seeing the world at a particularly difficult point in my life as my single, unchangeable writing style. Instead of allowing myself the time to see where this stream-of-consciousness experiment in discontent went, I shut it down.
North of 50 now, I want to encourage my 40-ish self to ride this thing out. Write in a journal, write online, write what suits you, Kim of 2009. Don’t let the medium dictate your content. Don’t stop writing what people are enjoying reading, or, even more importantly, what you’re enjoying writing. You can have many styles, many voices. Try them on and see how they fit, younger Me. As a writing coach I adore likes to say (and I’m paraphrasing): You have to write a lot of shit, pile that shit up, and then find the good shit. You want to put that shit online? Then do it.
I’m in a more settled time of my life now. I worry about fiber and cardiovascular exercise more than I used to. I don’t have wine and cheese for dinner anymore. Jamie and I are moving again, by choice, which is how we live now. I write in private, or in workshops, or in a book, using a good pen. I’ve fallen in love with the characters in a book I’ve been cyclicly unfaithful to working on for too many years. Nadine, Vita, Kate and Jules have been waiting to be brought fully into the world for far too long. It’s time to rededicate myself to the processes, voices and mediums that help me continue to develop as a writer. So I’m here, taking up space, putting myself out there. I’m blogging again, like it’s 2005.