A Post For My Friend A. When She Can't Sleep

So yesterday A. said that she had a confession to make.  Which was that she "blog-stalked" me in a fit of insomnia.  What came of that, she said, was that she realized the version of me she read on this blog is different from the version of me she hears on the phone.  Which, she wanted to know, was real?

Now I could have launched into a speech about the constructed nature of identity, that it is always a performance, etc.  After all, that's a major issue I deal with in my academic writing.  I told her, truthfully, they're both real.  But I do know what she means.

Some of that discrepancy has to do with questions of audience and the purpose of this space, as both somewhat therapeutic and also communal.  Some of it has to do with my wanting to be more chipper than I often feel; rewriting/reframing the narrative of my day through the lens of "small good things," for example, is a way to focus on the good during a time that is unquestionably abolutely terrifying and shitty.  But if I think about the bad--if I think about the fact that I still don't have a book contract and I still don't have tenure and I've done fertility treatment for 2.5 years and have lost multiple babies and--I'm completely paralyzed and overwhelmed.  It's not a space I can exist in for very long.

But when a good friend asks how are you? if you say okay, she knows that you're not really okay.  And then you're talking about the absolute terror of feeling like your uterus is a coffin.  And, yeah, that's not generally the voice that I use here.  Although I do believe that this voice, gwinne, is an honest voice.  And the voice I use with A is an honest voice.  And the voice I use in actual therapy, in which I am rather snarky as well as weepy, is an honest voice.  Why communicate at all if you're not being honest?

So here's where I'm at today:  I'm trying very hard to be happy pregnant woman.  I'm meeting my OB and getting an ultrasound.  M, who drove me to transfer, is coming with me just for kicks, and we're going out to lunch beforehand.  But I'm still petrified enough that as soon as I'm done writing this I'm getting out that doppler just for a 10 second, there you are little one check.  And then I'm going to try to get some of these papers graded, because really I've just got a few days before grades are due, and the sooner I get this crap done the sooner I can get on to my own writing (I hope).  So there you are.  And here I am.