Here’s something about being a writer who documents her life online: there’s this compulsion to make the narrative coherent, to enforce a kind of literary flow, to work toward having the whole of the story – whatever that means – fall together in a way that makes some kind of sense. And yet the process of blogging works against this. Blogging – the personal kind, anyway – is discursive, rambling: it documents a life, and life never unfolds with any kind of narrative coherence. My life doesn’t, anyway.

So it is that I lurch from angst to giggles, from crisis to commentary, from concern about HIV-positive orphans in Africa to idle speculation about the greater meaning of my daughter’s choice of clothing to soul-searching about life and death to random photographs tagged with quotes from Hegel. And sometimes I look at all this, and I wring my hands and I think: HOT MESS.

Of course, I also tell myself this: that this is what a life looks like, and this is what a blog looks like, and if it’s messy, it’s messy, and isn’t messiness just another kind of beauty, another kind of order, something that is not disordered but, rather, fluid and dynamic and natural and unforced and real?

And then I tell myself: whatever. Just keep writing.

(Repeat like mantra: JUST KEEP WRITING.)