Letting it All Hang Out

I read in the New York Times a few weeks ago about a study proving that modern adolescents can make their feelings of social inadequacy less stressful by writing a public blog discussing these feelings, opening the blog to comments. Comments from friends, from strangers, from enemies. I looked back – way back – on my own teenage years and said to myself, no way in hell.

Can you imagine spreading your feelings before the public, to be jeered at and trampled upon? Your feelings of inadequacy? I was so keen to keep my adolescent thoughts and feelings to myself that I wrote my diary in a cipher I invented. One time I came home from school and found my mother painstakingly deciphering it, sharing a good laugh with my little sister. This event was so traumatic that I might have told my shrink about it, if I ever had a shrink. Naturally I never did, because my feelings are my own, thank you very much. I'm not going to hire somebody to listen to me talk about them.

Yet I've been writing fiction for a number of years now, and yes, keeping a blog, two blogs actually, this one and my own blog (kategallison.blogspot.com). Wouldn't you think that the real Kate Gallison would peep out of the verbal thicket from time to time, mad-eyed, like Mr. Rochester's wife peeping out of his attic? Wouldn't you think she might expose her feelings of social inadequacy?

Maybe yes, maybe no. We are, after all, women (and men) of mystery here. We strive to entertain you, but not necessarily by exposing ourselves. If you want to know my most secret feelings you must sneak up on me at a cocktail party and wait for me to inadvertently blurt out one of the more embarrassing parts of my personal history. But I don't commit my real feelings to paper, or to a computer screen, when I can edit them. That's what the delete key is for.

The very idea.

Kate Gallison