A couple of weeks ago, I was reading over some of my older blog entries. When I’d finished, I sat back and thought, “Huh. That was actually kind of personal.” At least, more personal than I had remembered.
There’s a place where the personal and the important intersect. And we who blog are then called to make a decision: how important is so important that I can’t stay silent about this? In my case, that means I often end up blogging about issues related to people pleasing and boundaries (and occasionally feminism). I know there are lots of people who grew up in dysfunctional families just like I did, who have similar issues, and I know how helpful it can be to know there are others out there in the world dealing with the same kind of thing you’re dealing with. It’s too important for me to stay silent.
This trade-off was brought strongly to mind during this year’s Worldcon, where I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jay Lake. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Jay is a prolific SF/F writer of some note. He also blogs. For the past few years, he has blogged in an unusually open fashion about his difficulties with cancer. He blogs about disease, about mortality, about what he feels his cancer has stolen from him. He blogs about determination, depression, despair, and joy.
He told me he gets more fan mail from his cancer blog than he does from all his published fiction.
Me and Jay at Epic ConFusion this January. Photo by Al Bogdan.
And he pays a price for being personal. I spent time with him at several points during the convention, and every single time, we were approached by people who expressed their sorrow about his health, or asked about it, or gave him their good wishes that he would recover. On the one hand, it was beautiful to see this outpouring of support from the community.
But I looked at him at one point, late-ish in the evening, after a particularly long stream of generic good wishes, and I thought, “This must get completely exhausting.”
And that is the price. Not everyone will be able to look past the cancer and see the man. Because he has blogged so openly about his disease, he can’t necessarily create a veneer of normalcy for himself when at public events like Worldcon. Part of his public identity is linked to his cancer.
But he pays the price with grace, and I admire him so much for doing so. Because it is too important to stay silent. We need to hear about cancer, about illness, about mortality, and about the physical and emotional struggles that come with these oh-so-human things. Our society tends to have dysfunctional attitudes around illness, around death and dying, around grief and loss, and part of changing those attitudes is talking about these things in a frank and open way. And people who have cancer, people who have other serious illnesses, people who have loved ones who are sick, many of them are helped by Jay’s blog, where by writing authentically about his own personal experience, he puts words to so many other people’s experiences.
So I think about this blog, which is perhaps a bit more personal than I had originally intended. And then I think about Jay. And I’m glad to have written about what I think is important.
I’m in fabulous company.
The Practical Free Spirit 
That’s awesome you got to talk with Jay. His blog is a daily read of mine.
I read it every day too. And yes, I consider myself lucky. 🙂
[…] When the Personal is Important — Amy Sundberg on blogging and, well, me. […]
I had the pleasure of listening to Jay Lake at Norwescon on a panel discussion on blogging for authors. I found his attitude to be a courageous and remarkable. I am much more interested in reading an author’s blog that reveals their personal struggles with life and writing. Blogs by authors that self promote and simply mill the blogosphere and regurgitate others writing advice are a dime a dozen. It is the personal struggle of a writer, be it health or prose that make a blog interesting to me.
It’s true that becoming more personal does distinguish a blog from the hosts of blogs out there. I am very picky about which blogs I follow closely, and Jay’s is one that has held my interest over time.
A friend said the other day, after reading my latest surgery update on my blog, she wished she could be so open about her life in her writing. And I laughed. I told her she wouldn’t believe the stuff I refuse to blog about. She doesn’t believe it. Her point, she said later, was that I’d somehow made having a hysterectomy read like having a Big Adventure.
We need to hear about cancer, about illness, about mortality, and about the physical and emotional struggles that come with these oh-so-human things.
This is exactly why I choose to write about my panic disorder, my surgery, and my writing so openly.
And I admire you so much for doing so!
And yeah, we all have some line of what we won’t write about. The trick is figuring out exactly where it is. 🙂
:blush:
Also, I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that I really want to write about my botched C-section, but I keep putting it off. But I need to write about it just to get it out of my system whether no one reads the entry or not.
Oh, I think people will read it. Some now, and many later on through searches and such.
It takes a lot of energy to write about these things sometimes though. So I try to allow myself to take my own pace.