On blogging / Against compartmentalization

I wonder sometimes what this site is. It's not my journal, but it's not unlike a journal. I would never want to say that it's about me, so I resist calling it a personal blog.

But it is all personal. My intellectual pursuits, my artistic pursuits, they are no less personal than my emotional life or my relationships with family and friends. These things are not even distinct from each other. What I do and what I think and what I make, who and what I love, where I go, what I see, what I believe...it's a big wild soul-party of connection and mutual influence and engagement. It's kinda dialectical. Grounded theory.

I proceed from myself and my life. Always. Who doesn't? What other starting point is there?

It might be tidier, to my mind, if I could compartmentalize in my blogging life. Here's where I talk about my daily life, here's where I get to be a feminist, here's where I talk about embodiment and eating and mental health things... 

But it's impossible. Any divisions I made would be false and unsatisfying. So I'm not drawing any lines — except for the one between what I can write publicly about without facing significant, negative, not-worth-it consequences for my offline life, and what I can't.

Because as my "About" page used to say, this space is not only "about" the unity of experience, emotion, intellect, and creativity that I find in my days, it's also one of my tools for clarifying that unity. Which is to say, precisely as I need and like it.