Alchimie's Journal

In the 22 years since I discovered the keeping of online diaries I have left a trail of them across the internet landscape -- first on primitive websites with all the HTML written in a text editor, but later on Livejournal, Wordpress, and here on Dreamwidth. I always run out of steam eventually; I find myself reluctant to continue sharing, aware of all the inconsistencies I'm revealing, trapped by my own words and the past selves displayed by them. Alternately -- at times simultaneously -- I feel trapped by my public self as well; when I use our body name I am inevitably writing a partial account of my life, because I am unwilling to share that I am part of a multiple reality in places that might connect to my legal identity, and so I am always editing out some of my experience. For a while the solution seemed to be to keep a system journal, where any of us could post as we saw fit, and it still exists somewhere in the wild, but when I suddenly found myself with the strong urge to journal again, after four or five years away, I wanted my own space. And as always, I want it to be truly my own, and yet I think this time I must acknowledge that however much I live my own life, I do it in concert with many other people living their own lives within this body, and our internal lives twine and merge and part with each other, just as in the external world my life wraps around those of my children, my partners, my larger family and my friends both old and new.

So: here I am, again, writing here, again, seeing where it will take me. I do keep a private diary, from time to time, but for me there is something incredibly compellingg in this kind of public writing; I think it is that imagining a reader makes me feel like I am telling someone else something, rather than just reminding myself of what I already know. But at the same time, I am doing this very much for myself, trying to listen to my own voice. I have been feeling scattered of late, divided into too many boxes, the largest of which contains the mom/school volunteer/Girl Scout leader but does not seem to have any room for the poet/memoirist who reads incessantly, the fan of Japanese media & Steven Universe & Eurovision, the gardener who never makes time to garden, the antiquarian who loves old things simply because they are old. Myself, in other words, all the self that I am even before I am part of a multiple system, the confusing range of interests and desires and needs and fears and griefs and joys that I am still struggling to embrace as being my own.

Hello world. Whether I write here for a week or a year or a lifetime or never again, I am glad to be here today.