A page of one's own...a place of one's own

Last few weeks I have been thinking about the role of emotional endurance in long, taxing projects. There comes an inflection point when, to do the job, you and your team don't need skill but stamina. And if anyone has tried to build stamina even at a physical level, one knows that it is not a foundation to bigger things but a peak of more fundamental things - sleep, rest, purpose, diet, etc.

I feel that for me, my blog has been that fuel and compass for an enduring journey. (I have had my episodes of burnout and exasperation - but now when I look back, those were the times when I wasn't writing my blog.) When I started blogging, the blog was supposed to be the equivalent of Julia Cameron's morning pages. It was my only outlet to write free - I did not have to meet a project scope or a client's requirement or a reviewer's gaze or even my own expectations. I even called it Chiffoneseque because I wanted I wanted the blog to be my alter-ego. The real-time 3-D version of me is usually opinionated and perpetually annoyed. In contrast, the blog was supposed to be like the gentle wisp of a delicate fabric. Slowly over time, it collected an audience. (Initially, I would insist that my friends read it. Many of them did. Many of them told me that I was writing about the same things they were privy to in reality so it was a waste of time.) But I later got to be quite close to it - as if it were a favorite park bench you could sit on in the twilight hours, eat a sandwich, and watch a bird peck a puppy.

What the blog has taught me about human nature is fascinating. Many times, people who read my blog meet me and they find a disconnect between the person they imagine as the writer of the blog and me. Once I had written about something political and the backlash was immense. (If you have to threaten to kill someone in the name of your culture, then what is the culture you defend?) Sometimes people read something disparaging about themselves on the blog (I don't use names but if you know, you know). Then those people disappear. (That perhaps is the best use of the blog as far as I can tell - a shield against everything fake - no matter how compelling the contours of convenience are). There are people who read the blog regularly and then pretend that they don't. I understand that. It's a personal blog with personal stuff - maybe in a professional transaction, you don't want to make it apparent that you know about how crushed I was with Rushdie's attack.

But I think the blog is my answer to enduring a relentless tedium of work that does not stop and days that do not end. I write for a living, and living itself can be a grueling affair. But the fact that I can do it for free, for ease, for strangers, for friends, for relatives who would rather read the blog than call me (I sincerely appreciate that, fam!) - is no small solace.

Today I write a smattering of things - mainly a quick list of what I am grateful for. Why? Because a long time ago I came across this quote by Oscar Wilde (in Dorian Gray or Lady Windermere's Fan I think) and it moved me deeply, "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."

So that's what the blog has become today - a bench for me and Mr. Wilde to sit and watch the sun go down and stars peep out.