I’m starting to realize that De Morbo Sacro has become the diaristic cousin of my savings account at BMO. Whereas I pay four dollars a month to keep the latter open simply because I’ve had it since I was five and can’t bear to close it, I doggedly continue updating the former because it’s a link to the past that I’m unwilling to let go—and because once I commit to something, be it opening a bank account or establishing a blog, I’m in it for the long haul. Who cares if I do essentially all of my banking elsewhere; who cares if I’m one of the last bloggers standing. Both are like shreds of a childhood comfort blanket, and I’m not unsentimental enough to chuck those in the trash.
But just as there’s a monetary cost to sinking a monthly fee into something I don’t use, there’s a cost to sinking time into blog posts. Shreds of a blanket are one thing; a king-sized duvet is another. This has become clearer in recent months as I’ve noticed with increasing frequency that my thinking about and composing posts directly impacts how, and if, I approach the other forms of writing with which I’ve been slowly reengaging. In contrast with these longer-term projects, which require a longer-term commitment and thus delayed gratification, a blog entry is a concrete, manageable task that provides a more immediate sense of satisfaction: write, edit, publish, done. It’s distraction I can justify but distraction nonetheless. (In fact, I’m currently distracting myself from making progress on a different project by working on this instead … and I feel pretty darn justified in it.) And yet it’s not as if these entries jump straight from my neurologically muddled brain onto the page. I put an unreasonable amount of care and energy into each of them because that’s the person I am, and for each entry I end up publishing, there are one or two that I write to near-completion but ultimately leave in the drafts folder because I forget, lose interest, or decide that the end product isn’t up to snuff so must be shielded from the public’s eyes, which I assume to be judging my every turn of phrase with the harshness of a grandstanding literary critic.
Of course, blogging has served more purposes than just appeasing the part of me that loves an obligation. It’s been an invaluable way for me to communicate what’s going on in my life when it’s felt too overwhelming to repeat the same story to all interested parties. Over time, as I’ve gained knowledge and confidence, it’s been a means with which I can spread awareness in my own weirdo manner about the chronic health conditions that I experience. It’s also allowed me to hone my writing skills and begin to develop an authorial voice. Now, though, it’s my preference to share on a one-to-one basis, and it’s possible for me to do so because I’m out in the world rather than stuck in a hospital bed. Relatedly, as I try to lean into other aspects of my personhood (while not hiding, to others or to myself, that I remain profoundly affected and limited by my chronic illnesses and disabilities), I’m more reluctant than I once was to disclose personal health details. My writing skills are far from perfect, and my “voice” is still in a teenage-boy cracking-and-changing phase, but I’m sensing more and more that in order to take the next steps toward refining both, I need to push myself further out of the blogosphere and more squarely into other genres.
Where does that leave me? The answer is an unsatisfying shrug of the shoulders and a return to that dodgy banking analogy. I’ll indeed conclude by reflecting on the fact that although I occasionally toy with the idea of cutting ties with BMO, I concluded long ago that four bucks is a small price to pay for nostalgia. I did, however, downgrade to the most basic plan. It occurs to me that I can make a similar compromise here. Since I’m not yet ready to write a “this is my last post” post and archive DMS (is that how one shuts down a blog?), I’ll further downgrade my self-expectations regarding the frequency and quality of my entries and let them, and this, be whatever shape eventually emerges from the murkiness of my indecision. I might be inspired to write and publish something next week; it might be a year from now. I might eventually migrate to a different platform. What I won’t do is force something that’s no longer working for me in its current form. In other words: we’ll see.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 