“Dear Internet”

Today I put into play something I’d put in my own diary about a month ago: slowblogging, a microperformance, a call to action best answered by just a small handful of people. For three hours, I invited anybody who wanted to come get a private reading from my diary, if they managed to catch the announcement I made about it as I was doing it (on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook).

Why not just put it in your blaaaaaag Melissa? I wanted to tell stories without them being part of the awkward, extended performance that is my ten years of blogging. I wanted a private place in public. I wanted to share it.

Blogging had done something corrupt to my diary writing. So I took the last few months to turn almost completely away from (sorry) personal-storytelling-on-the-internet and headed back to the diary, which can keep a secret for at least a few minutes. There’s nothing pure or sacred about it. It’s really just about being fair to time and to memory. (Even if I go back and read it almost immediately.)

My diary is my favorite book to pull out on the train or waiting for the train or waiting for someone or after someone. It’s my constant. I’ve been keeping track of everything that way — dates, lovers, transformations, scraps of stories — for as long as I’ve been writing, which is almost thirty years. The first one I still have is from when I was six and even then, there is a sense in it that it will be read. There is kissing in it.

There’s an element of performance to it, keeping a diary. The diary itself is compromised: let’s blame the rise of the memoir, and the death of books, and Facebook, and Anaïs Nin, who never got enough credit for her work as the first blogger. Nin lied in hers. She never let anyone read it. She’s got over a dozen volumes in print.

We don’t believe in diaries. They are instruments for writers to build bigger stories about themselves, or, they are boring. There’s not room much in the middle, and they don’t even sell for that much money these days.

My diary is the first thing I wanted to put on the internet. I’ve scanned so many pages I’ll never let anyone upload. This was before all of this: before it was easy, before it was an act.

But this, even this is a performance. Telling you this. Telling you I have a secret. Even in bed when a lover runs down a list of our night previous, I have to make fun of myself — “Oh, are you just doing the sketch for the diary yourself now?” — before he takes his own turn at me. It’s not narcissism. I’m not in love with myself. I’m in love with the story.