Discovery (Fear and Desire) 2

So, I got over the fear part of discovery about ten minutes after I signed off on my last post, and simultaneously succumbed to a fever of desire. Nothing could have made me happier than reading a comment from Natasha this morning. What she writes is wonderful, and so is the larger fact of having a reader, at all. Writing this blog so far feels like tapping a microphone--"Is this thing on?"

Anyway, I got over the fear and got into the desire. What is this desire about? I think it's about wanting to make connection, to be in conversation, to reveal and discover. In writing personal essays, I think always about the delicate dance between revelation and restraint that I try to achieve with every piece. It's a dance I experience as essential, not only to how I want to write, but to how I want to live. It's possible for me to live this way in writing, but hardly possible at all in daily life. In the everyday, I feel I am always tipping over too far on the scale somehow. In the classroom, well, the image I will offer is me gripping the podium until my fingers go numb. This is, of course, an exaggeration. But it does describe something of my internal experience. Ten years into a teaching career, and I still haven't really figured out if I want my students to know anything about what's going on behind my professorly armor.

On the other hand, making connections with civilians sometimes proves to be just as challenging. You take a risk, multiple risks, with someone, and then, suddenly, or so it seems, that person is no longer part of your life. What happened? There are reunions I long for, even as I know they may never happen. This is the case with the older friend I wrote about in my first post.

I edited that post, by the way. In the first version, I described him in a way that later made me worry. I did that less to protect his privacy than to protect my own freedom.

The general dinner party scene, however, I feel I must preserve, for it provided the impetus for this blog. I told my husband, John, after we got home, about my uncomfortable feelings of exposure during the dinner. "This is something for you to write about," said John. It makes sense to me, countering those feelings of expsoure with my own, deliberate, exposure. It's a way of "owning," the story, even though the story belongs to me only partially. Still, I believe that telling it, sharing it, is a way, somehow, of protecting it. Revealing it on this blog is a way of keeping it mine.

Yes, I am aware that I have yet to reveal the "story" in question. I'm gearing up to that, but I must warn you-- it may take a while.