I keep telling myself that the reason I haven’t posted anything to this blog in over a week is because I’ve been busy. But that’s not true. The real reason is that someone wrote an anonymous hateful (and very personal) comment on one of the posts and it completely deflated me.

I know that whenever you put yourself or your opinions out into the world there will always be people who have nasty things to say about it. I expected it when I started this blog. But I would be lying if I said that it didn’t still feel like a slap.

I started going through old posts, removing the most personal details about my life that I had written, thinking that if I shared less about myself I would be less vulnerable to personal attacks. I thought about changing the format of the blog, about giving it up entirely. I wondered if it wasn’t a completely self-indulgent project in the first place (surely my anonymous commenter would say it was).

Then I thought back to why I started this blog, which is because I believe in the power of personal storytelling. I believe that when we share pieces of ourselves, when we offer a window into our lives for other people to look through, it serves as a kind of communion. And at a time in history when we often feel cut off from one another because of technology, culture, and lifestyle, it seems important to grab little pieces of each other whenever and wherever we can.

The things that have affected me the most online, the things that have caused me to stop what I am doing and to examine my life, have not been news blurbs or special reports. They have all been personal stories written (or told on video) by other people. Not all the personal writing out there has had this effect on me, but when I sit down to think about what type of writing has most changed my life I keep coming back to personal narrative, creative nonfiction, memoir, and the first-person essay.

I have noticed a good deal of distain in modern Western culture for these types of writing; somehow we see them as having less value than straight-forward nonfiction, historical works, or journalistic accounts of important events. We think of their authors as narcissists, self-obsessed nobodies, or as thinking they have something important to say when, in fact, they do not. And in some cases, that is true. But I don’t believe it is any more true of the writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from within than it is of news writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from without.

I believe that personal writing should be evaluated in the context of something much larger. It is not just about the individual writer or the pieces that he or she is writing. It is about the lot of them. If we were to string together all the personal scraps—all the essays and the blogs and the love letters and the memoirs—written at one point, we would have a record of that time more faceted and nuanced and rich than anything we could ever hope to find in a history book. Subjectivity is not the enemy of objectivity. Writers who share parts of themselves and their experiences fill out all the holes in our objectively written history, they are the keepers of our collective memory—one day, one thought, one word, one comma at a time.

So to my anonymous commenter, and to anyone else who thinks that personal writing and blogging is a self-indulgent whine fest: I invite you to stop reading at any time.¹

And to everyone else: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your interest in my teeny tiny sliver of our shared history.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, gives a talk at the TED conference about the fickle nature of creativity and how it connects us with something greater, something over which we have absolutely no control.

This past year has been a hard one, perhaps the most difficult of my life: I lost two dear friends, moved across the country to a place I couldn’t stand,¹ turned around seven months later to move back home only to leave my husband three thousand miles away. We are hideously in debt from student loans, and the financial crash has left us without savings.

Things are bad.²

In the midst of all this, though, something wonderful has happened: I no longer care. Everything that I thought was important—my best friend, my financial security, the comfort of waking up every morning next to the person I love—has been taken away. And what I realize is: I am still alive. I am still breathing. My Fuck It Threshold, as Joshua calls it, has gone way down; I have gained the ability to let that which truly does not matter, slide.³

I have let go.

And I see the same thing happening to everyone around me. I see people losing their jobs, people restructuring their entire lives, people having to lean on others more than ever. I see a country, whose self worth was once based on prosperity and abundance, having to formulate a new identity for itself. And as terrifying as that is, I believe it is a positive thing. I believe we are molting, sloughing off the superfluous. We are coming to a collective reckoning about what is important, and it has nothing to do with how many Louis Vuitton bags we have per capita or who won the last round of American Idol. We are finally, at long last, learning what it means to be alive.

At the end of the day, those of us who are lucky are still breathing. We are scared, but we are breathing. We are reconnecting with each other, with simpler things. We are finding that it is possible to go forward by going backward a little. And we are, all of us, clean slates awaiting a vision for the future.

I just caught a rerun of Six Feet Under, a show which always inspires me. This particular episode ends with a conversation that gave me a lot to think about. It is a dialogue between David, one of the main characters who was just assaulted, and his dead father Nathaniel whom he continues to talk to. It was written by Nancy Oliver who also wrote one of my favorite screenplays of all time. Hope you enjoy it:

Nathaniel: You’re missing the point.

David: There is no point, that’s the point. Isn’t it?

Nathaniel: The point’s right in front of your face.

David: Well I’m sorry but I don’t see it.

Nathaniel: You’re not even grateful are you?

David: Grateful? For the worst fucking experience of my life?

Nathaniel: You hold onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well let me tell you: let it go. [Looking skyward] Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.

David: Well what am I supposed to do?

Nathaniel: What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard, you’re alive. What’s a little pain compared to that?

David: It can’t be so simple.

Nathaniel: What if it is?

When I am worried or anxious, when things look particularly bleak, I watch really bad movies. I’m not talking about the good kind of bad movies. I mean total crap. I do this because I cannot drink¹ and am too much of a control freak for hard drugs.² Lately—what with the state of the world being as it is and the fact that I am separated from my love by 3,000 miles—I’ve been on a real bender: I have recently introduced horrifically bad television programming into my regimen.³

Last week, in a moment of dire need, I queued up the first episode of Leave It To Beaver on my shiny silver Macintosh. To my great surprise, it turned out to be wonderful. Really, truly wonderful. Each episode begins with Ward’s voiceover telling us what we will learn over the next thirty minutes. A moral!⁴ Imagine that.

The language alone will slay you. Whether it’s June, straightfaced, saying,”Ward, I’m very worried about the Beaver” or the Beav insulting one of his classmates: “Violet Rutherford drinks gutter water,” the language cannot be stopped.

The most incredible thing about the show for me, though, is the pace of the Cleavers’ life. They are not harried or overworked. They are not thinking about the next IPO or all the unread emails on their Blackberrys. June has time to pack the boys’ lunches in the morning and Ward has time to take them into the garage in the evening to teach them how to beat up their classmates. And it’s not just the Cleavers. Everyone in town has free time. When The Beav’s principal hears that Ward is under the weather, she takes it upon herself to send flowers over to the house. When his teacher wants to get a message home to June she types up a letter and sends it home with Beaver. People actually talk to each other and have meaningful human contact.

It leaves me to wonder: where did all our time go? Are we dawdling it away writing emails, updating our facebook statuses, and tweeting ourselves blind? Is it possible that all of the things we’ve designed to make our lives simpler are in fact adding to our burden?

I mentioned to someone⁵ a few months ago how much I hate talking on the phone and emailing, feeling constantly obliged to check messages. He asked me a very pointed question, “What would happen if you just stopped?”

Me: Come again?
Him: What would happen if you only checked your voicemail and email when you felt like it?
Me: I don’t understand.

My first reaction was an overwhelming panic: I would lose jobs! My family would be angry! No one would talk to me again!

But I’ve started thinking about it more seriously, about dropping out of the technological communication stream. I imagine checking emails once a week, voicemails twice a month. I imagine feeling like I do when I’m on vacation, when my mind is finally able to quiet down.

I wonder if I would regain some of that lost time that the Cleavers seem to be swimming in. There’s no doubt I would send and receive fewer phone calls, curt emails, and text messages from friends and family. But my hunch is that I would write more letters, spend more time with people in person, and enjoy my life more fully.

Anyone want to try it?

For the past week I haven’t been able to get the story of Nadya Suleman, the woman who gave birth¹ to octuplets², out of my head. A few days ago I learned that Suleman already has six children at home, all conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF). Today I read an article that Suleman is a single mother who lives with her own mother. I struggle to understand why someone would make such choices.

Coincidentally, I have just discovered the reality T.V. show Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht about a couple, Jon and Kate Gosselin, who conceived twin girls through IVF. Years later, when they decided they wanted to have one more child, they submitted to the procedure again and found themselves pregnant with sextuplets. Each episode documents the day-to-day chaos of their lives and for a number of reasons is very difficult for me to watch.

The parents are haggard, and understandably so. They are barely getting by. Their lives consist of changing diapers, cooking meals, cleaning up, disciplining, making schedules, changing diapers, cooking meals, cleaning up, disciplining, making schedules. Repeat. They have little time for each other and no time to themselves. Their own needs and dreams and desires have evaporated completely.

In order to keep a household with eight small children from devolving into mayhem, rules and schedules are paramount; a tight ship must be maintained. And as a result, it is not possible for the parents to fully embrace the rhythms of each child. There just isn’t time. When one of the three boys takes longer to be potty trained than the rest of his brothers and sisters, Ms. Gosselin leaves him in a room alone on his training toilet, turns out the light and tells him he cannot get up or leave until he goes to the bathroom. When another child is sick, he is left on the couch to his own defenses. Taking time to tend to him would disrupt the order of the household. When the kids take an interest in something in nature, there is no time for exploration or discovery. It’s move ‘em in and move ‘em out.

Both the Gosselins and Ms. Suleman were given the option to selectively reduce the number embryos when they discovered how many had successfully implanted. They both refused the procedure, which I believe was a result of their faith, despite the increased risk of complications for the fetuses and the mother.

Like the Gosselins and Ms. Suleman, I too believe that every life is sacred. But I place a strong value on the quality of life as well. You need only watch five minutes of the Gosselins routine to see that the quality of life for every member of that family has been compromised. Similarly, some of Ms. Suleman’s children–who so far have been tagged with the letters A-H instead of given names–weighed little over a pound when they were born and will need to remain in the hospital for many weeks because their internal organs are not developed enough to keep them alive. Some may have long-lasting deficiencies as a result of their premature delivery and lack of development. Personally, I believe that creating a life for its own sake is less sacred than giving a child a life that allows them quality one-on-one time with their parents, the ability to explore their internal and external environments to the fullest, and a chance to grow outside the constraints of a rigid family structure. And I believe that the parents’ quality of life is of equal importance, that having a family should not erase the pursuit of one’s own goals outside of the family or one’s ability to have time for oneself.

It would be easy to blame this on religion. But this is not a matter of religion. Religion did not implant those embryos into these women’s wombs. This is a matter of science. Science should never put a family in a position of having to choose between what is on one hand what they perceive to be murder, and is on the other hand a risky medical situation that compromises the health and safety of all involved.

I understand that fertility treatments are costly, exhausting, and disruptive to one’s life. And I understand why families and doctors choose to implant multiple embryos to increase the odds of a successful implantation. But we have reached a point when, with the help of medicine, we are able to make possible the most unlikely and unnatural of circumstances, which, though miraculous, ultimately decrease the quality of these families’ lives.

Added to which, these families—the Gosselins, the Duggars, and now the Sulemans—have no real incentive to think through the consequences of their choices. We offer them television shows, endorsement deals, free plastic surgery,³ and room in the spotlight.⁴ And they are forced to make spectacles of themselves for our consumption just so they can stay financially afloat.

I hope that the ethicists are working overtime on this issue and that a solution can be reached which honors a family’s faith, its right to choose, and its emotional and physical well being.