I’m taking a hiatus from guest blogging. The reason? Most popular blogs are academic and the academy has a history of fundamentally excluding many of us.
Academia has adapted in recent years to include more of us: women, people of color, etc., yet, its roots lie in exclusion.
When I was a student, I had to conform to excel. I had to play nice with people in charge, kiss up, and fit my intelligence into their definition of “smart”.
They got to define smart. I learned to run my ideas by their filter for approval. It’s still automatic for me to feel insecure around them and to assume they have the final word on my RELEVANCE, intelligence, inclusion, acceptability, even womanhood.
And their model has some thick stitches of shame threaded through it that I’m finding I do better without.
So my choice to write only on my own blog (for right now) is one of self-care, self-preservation, a desire to retain the potency of the words of my soul without diluting them with academic notions to appease or impress anyone, unless I want to.
I am way too conscious of egos and their protective mechanisms to feel safe (or like it’s worth the bother) to negotiate with anyone who wants to censor me in THEIR space. So it’s necessary I have my own space.
It’s just I’ve been silenced too long.
I have zero tolerance for even a single word being corrected because it’s someone else’s space (at the moment).
It seems I need time and space from the notion that there’s a right way or a better way to communicate ideas that others have and I don’t, maybe lots of time, maybe a whole lifetime of open field. It’s an act of self love that I need to be really generous with myself.
This is also an invitation for others that it’s possible, you can reclaim your own voice, outside the notions of smart and stupid; you can publish your own words any time you want.
In this, there is also a celebration of a movement to advance a growing sense of democracy of voice. Yes, larger more well known blogs reach a much larger audience, but many of the best musicians, especially female singers, started their own labels to resist censorship.
Ani Difranco: “I’d rather play my songs/for the 6 people sitting at the bar/than for all those men in their business suits/saying, ‘I’ll take you away from this/if you just get in the car.'”
Blogs are quite different from large record companies, I’m aware. The similarity is that sometimes a small readership or audience can be satisfying. Some would rather have a small readership and be able to say exactly what they want, how they want to, than to write with a bit of desire for mainstream approval to reach a larger audience.
This is true for me right now and it could change. We’re on the cutting edge of consciousness exploration as a society and we need those “little” things that would be censored out more than ever (plus I already excel at self censorship).
It’s also HOW I write when I know I will self publish versus when I knew I’d be “submitting” my words for acceptance, rejection, judgement, assessment, approval, or even shaming.
How I write is completely different when I intend to self publish. I feel so powerful and in alignment, and this is my purpose in writing: to communicate from a centered place of connection with a higher source.
It’s unfortunate that the publishing industry, with its scarcity model, limited what kinds of ideas could be published and how. Yet, there has always been grassroots self publishing of some kind. There have always been ways to read the words of women, common folk, those outside of institutionalized education, those who are self taught, those who’ve learned what they know from life itself, who write from their souls to feed other souls.
Now we have opportunities for those many voices to spread and infiltrate consciousness, and arguably the most important ones for us to hear are the ones we haven’t already been hearing from, the ones who have views, lifestyles and life experiences that lie outside academic walls (which we all do!).
So for the moment my choice is clear: I’d like to write 100% freely from my soul and feed whoever is hungry for it. The intention of my writing is to heal, not just to intellectually educate. I want my words to reach your core, and from the response I get, I think they do.
I invite you to support me on Patreon, if you’d like, as I’m committed to blogging every weekday for a year (unless I’m sick/moving/have an emergency-please no more moving though!). https://www.patreon.com/chaya
What I’m not saying:
Writing for larger blogs is wrong/less soulful/I regret doing so, I will not do so again, anyone is wrong for doing so, larger blogs sites are purely white male and academic, all white men are the same, academics/white male voices aren’t oppressed by academia too, there are no virtues in academia or academic writing…
Nope, I’m not saying any of these things.
Yes! You are brilliant and your words move me. They inspire and support. Thank you. Thank you. A hundred, thousand times: thank you.
<3<3<3
Hi Chaya, I guess my attitude is different. I rarely get to guest blog anywhere. I am a professional writer (they call us that if we earn our MFA) and am waiting for the big day when someone actually WANTS me. In Boston, I couldn’t get a speaking engagement at all, no one wanted to hear what I had to say, and some people even told me so.
I joined a church. They told me I was welcome at church if I DIDN’T write. My psychiatrist tried to drug me to stop me from writing, and she said so, literally.
On the other hand, any time someone round here contacts me and says, “Can you help me with x,” I am so overjoyed I want to cry, because here, I am not rejected that way, and I’m not considered “mentally ill” or “stupid.”
The USA gov’t wrote me off, my family wrote me off, and I swear that during the last two years I spent in USA the one word I heard more than any other was “No.”
I know I am talented and capable and I still don’t understand why people turned their backs.
I been blogging for ten years, Chaya. At first, several times a month, but after a while, daily almost. I have to force myself to take breaks from it, since I need to do other things, too.