How I Finally Learned Something From Emily Gould

For a long time, I detested Emily Gould’s New York Times Magazine story, “Exposed”. I thought it was an overlong, self-indulgent, too insidery, navel-gazing piece of crap that was completely inappropriate for the Times.

But since I started interning at Gawker (which I’d read throughout Emily’s tenure as its editor), I’ve developed a kind of meta-obsession with Gawker itself. So I went on a little nostalgia kick and started reading old posts, studying the former editors’ work, and voyeuristically devouring the sordid drama of Nick Denton’s twisted little media/sociology experiment. Especially circa 2007. Those kids were nuts.

At the same time, I was preparing to turn this blog into more than just a portfolio of my work. I was ready to move beyond the banalities of the LiveJournal I’d kept in high school (Ha!) and commit myself to some serious personal blogging. (Double ha!)

So as I re-read Emily’s piece, I started to view her story in a different light. A more forgiving light. And somehow, it began to resonate with me. I had begun appreciate it on some small level, for reasons I did not yet fully know.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I posted an item that — thanks to Trackbacks, some shameless self-promotion on Facebook, and the magic of Twitter — took off like wildfire and started a mini-shitstorm that got me canned from my campus newspaper “job,” scored me an offer to do some freelance blogging, and raked in almost 4,000 pageviews. Okay, not that impressive, but it’s like a 4,000% increase over the traffic I was getting just days before!

And with (what felt like) all eyes on me, I suddenly understood the pressure (and responsibility) of being free to write whatever I wanted without any supervision or oversight. Hitting that “Publish” button was terrifying. And thrilling. Without knowing it, I was suddenly walking through land mines and into a crash course on the dangers of personal blogging.

But I had also played it safe, in a way. What I’d written was impersonal and detached, and I’d written it not because it was an issue that had weighed on me or as a response to anything or anyone in particular. I’d simply observed something I thought was interesting and let my mind take off. In my head, I had criticized institutions and situations, not people.

Some of the people from those institutions and in those situations didn’t quite see it that way. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I still don’t, completely.

Last night, I wrote a post that, despite its glib and belligerent tone, was actually about something pretty serious and, yes, personal. And, if you’d read it, you can tell it was about something very, very specific. This was not unintentional; I was angry at someone, and while we had somewhat hashed it out earlier, I was unsatisfied. I had more to say. And I had to say it. And I had to say it in front of everyone.

Needless to say, my friend wasn’t pleased. I anticipated this, but I couldn’t help myself. And for the first time, I thought, “God, this is what Emily Gould was talking about.”

I guess realizing that your words can actually affect the people you write about is a rite of passage that most bloggers, and probably anyone who writes about themselves, must go through. I’d never read Julie Powell’s blog nor book, but I did see the movie. In it, there’s a scene where Julie and her husband get into a screaming match over her blogging obsession and the strain it’s placed on their relationship. In Emily’s article, she describes the fights her “over-sharing” sparked between her and (at least two) boyfriends. I sense a pattern.

Coincidentally, journalists write about people all the damned time; we just keep ourselves so objective, supposedly, that we’re rarely faced with the consequences of what we write. You’d think this knowledge might prepare a journalist-turned-blogger for encountering the pitfalls of narrating his own life. It does not.

So if the fall-out from blogging is so ugly, why do we still feel this compulsion to put ourselves and our lives through the proverbial meat grinder day after day? You’d think WordPress is like opening a can of Pringles, or something. This is the question posed to me last night. Well, let us revisit Emily, who — I now realize — so aptly answered these inquiries of our masochistic and exhibitionist tendencies:

My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small — and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.

I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.

After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet.

I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn’t invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.

We blog, in other words, for the same reason we do anything. To try, however feebly, to leave some mark of ourselves on the world. To carve out and stake claim to some tiny corner of the universe, even if it’s just virtual packets of data shared over cables and radio signals.

It’s self-indulgent, absolutely, but maybe begging for mudita and submitting ourselves to schadenfreude isn’t really that bad. For some of us, when we’re happy, or proud, or angry, or sad, or frustrated, or afraid, or alone, self-indulgence is all we have; and sharing it with someone — even if we’ll settle for anyone — is all we can do to soothe our neuroses.

As for Emily… let me just say, she was dead-on about that “slightly queasy” part. Blogs should come with a free bottle of Pepto Bismol.