Eccentric Flower:201105/Suppression

I'm in a bad mood today because I allowed myself to be in a bad mood earlier today in a place where I shouldn't have been in a bad mood at that length.

The rest of this entry will discuss and explain the statement above.

This morning I posted several items in my personal Twitter feed that were really one long continuous rant - which I keep trying to get myself not to do, especially not on Twitter where it is spammy and fools no one; a rant is still a rant whether it's presented as two paragraphs of continuous text or six 140-character segments.

Of course the bigger issue was that the rant did not need to be posted anywhere at all, and yet it happened anyway. That rant was determined to escape. I was not awake enough yet, not vigilant enough, to keep it from getting out. I was annoyed by something in my personal universe, as I often am, and boom! a rant inflicted in a format unsuitable for it upon people who really didn't need to read it.

The idea here is that there is to be no more ranting in any place which can be found by anyone except the very determined. When I post this, I will make sure to delete the tag that says to syndicate it (thereby removing the announcement of its existence on LiveJournal). I will not post an announcement of it on Twitter. This rant is for me, just as this journal space is for me; it is, as I said a couple of entries back, now exclusively a place where I can vent longer-form ventings while maintaining the fiction that no one is reading them. I can't lock this place up completely from you masochists and voyeurs (I'll explain why below), so pretending you're not there is the next best thing.

Yes. I call you names. I love you all, and I greatly appreciate your tolerance, but I call you names. Here's why: Despite the fact that I love and thrive on your presence, I sincerely believe two things:

1. You don't deserve my ranting. Really, what did you do to have this inflicted on you? Is that any way to treat one's friends?

2. You enjoy my ranting a little too much. I'm quite aware that I'm a big joke to some of you, that while you do sincerely like me, you also wink to one another. I've seen the wink. "Oh, Columbina's off on a tear again." That wink pisses me off. I never wanted to have a reputation as a grouch. I can't tell you how much it annoys me that that's the primary pigeonhole some of you have placed me into. When it comes to that, I don't care that you're genuine friends. I don't want to be known for my crabbiness. Period. "Curmudgeon" is not the word I want on my tombstone. Love me for something else or don't love me at all.

The problem is that I don't help my case much. I'm aware of this, believe me. I have got to vent or it eats me alive, but I seem to still be having trouble finding a place to vent it. And every time I do vent where someone sees, I cringe, knowing I have once again moved my reputation in a direction that I'm supposed to be trying to move it away from.

This space is not spontaneous enough. It doesn't lend itself to short work. The physical act of posting an entry here takes about five minutes of overhead to do; five minutes may not seem like a lot, but Twitter is always up (I more or less keep it running at all times when I'm awake, except on weekends) and posting things there is as simple as typing. That's also its problem. The barriers are too low; the filter is nonexistent.

Keeping a paper journal or some other offline journal won't do; writing longhand has become far too difficult for me, and besides, I have realized I can't lock it up fully. For some reason, the act of venting must have some witnesses for it to be effective; the catharsis doesn't work if I perform it without some audience, however small. I'm sure this is some bizarre self-flagellation thing, but there you have it: one part of my brain desperately wants there to be no witnesses to my rants, another part knows there has to be someone or the point is gone.

The thing about the Impudence space is that it has allowed me to separate out the spontaneous and cheerful part of my brain. In effect it is carving out a new personality (but less schizophrenic than that sounds, please). That personality is a legitimate subset of me; I'm not inventing a new identity, just selecting certain bits of the existing one. The posts there are the ideal; they are the personality I want to project, the bits I want people to see. They are the part that does occasionally link cute animal photos (even while aware of the banality of doing so), the part that likes odd art and interesting words, the part that has fun, the part that makes dumb jokes, the part that can be sarcastic occasionally but is never bitter, never despairing, never overly cynical, and seldom overly mean. You know, the part that people might actually want to get to know.

It doesn't lend itself to in-depth content, I admit - it seems like a more superficial personality - but that may actually be a positive thing. The longer I am allowed to make an entry, the worse I emerge from it. It's much easier for me to keep to the shiny happy bits if I keep it short.

I am determined to carry out this Sisyphean labor. I know I am doomed to fail and it will make me crazy, but I am not going to stop trying. I am going to control what the world sees of me. I have spent the last few years attempting to suppress all the creative parts of my brain, the parts that want to work on things which have no use, no audience, and no reward; now I am devoting myself to the fight to suppress the nasty, despairing parts of my brain, the parts that believe there is no hope in the world and that every one of its enterprises is inevitably corrupt. I am going to keep going until only Violet/Viola is left or until I put an iron spike through my head, whichever comes first.

(Nah, I wouldn't actually do that. That's just rhetoric. You know how I am about rhetoric.)

Now I realize that some of you may prefer the part of me you see here to the part of me you see at Impudence. If you're one of those people, please try not to be too offended when I ask with genuine bewilderment: What the hell is wrong with you? Ask yourself: Who would you rather have dinner with - me or Violet?

And if you have actually had dinner with me, do bear in mind that what you get from me in person is a lot closer to Violet than it is to the "me" you habitually see here. The person you enjoyed seeing (or at least I hope you did)? That wasn't the person writing entries on this site. I try to stick to Violet-ish topics when you see me in person, as I'm aware that no one would want the real me as a dinner guest. Which is also why I don't see any of you in person very often, because some days keeping all non-Violet parts suppressed is just too hard for me to do.

What I need to learn - urgently - is that when I'm having days like those, days like today, I need to step away from Twitter entirely.

You remember what your mother told you, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all?" Well, I'm still working on it, but the theory here is, "If you can't post something Violet would post, don't post anything at all." It's a harsh regime. It may, as I say, make me crazy. I know some of you would prefer the unfiltered version. But I am not going to go to my grave with only eight people in this world realizing that I am not actually the crabbiest person on earth. That is not the way I want to be known. Since I can't show most of you the good bits in person - since there may actually never be opportunities to show some of you the good bits in person - the least I can do is try to keep all the non-good bits out of the way to avoid muddying the picture.

Do you know that there are a couple of people already who follow the Impudence Tumblr who have never encountered me any other way? They have no idea of the backstory. They don't know anything but the stuff I post there. They just think I am a slightly weird person who links and likes lots of interesting shiny things. Knowing that those people think that, and only that, of me warms my heart slightly every time I contemplate it. Of course I don't want to write the rest of you wonderful people off - I like you - but you will need retraining. I hope one day that most of you will be able to think about me without mentally appending "the grump" to my name.

I don't plan on giving the grumpiness no outlet at all. I do plan to keep posting political links and "the world is going to hell" links (those two categories being mostly synonymous) on my non-Violet Twitter feed, where they can be done ephemerally and then vanish. But the ranting on Twitter has got to go. It has got to go. There is a new regime here, and it has zero ranting tolerance. Which - to bring us back to the beginning - is why I am so unhappy with myself at my slipup this morning.