Last month on another site where I had an internet presence, I was cyber-bullied and attacked. The most frustrating part of the experience was having it spill over into other areas of my life that I felt had nothing to do with the particular internet community in which I was engaged where the bullying took place. Someone even found this poetry blog somehow and left a comment on one of my poems addressing the drama at the other site. I was so incredibly offended by that. I believed that this blog was a place for my writing to be respected and taken care of by others who come by here on occasion; to ignore the content of the site and simply fixate on silliness happening elsewhere felt like a violation of what I thought was a sacred writing space.

I’ve since come to realize that no space can be completely sacred in the eyes of others. Anywhere I exist – be it in the virtual or real world – is at risk of disrespect from outsiders. I am fooling myself if I pretend otherwise.

So what do I do in response? Do I shut everything down, turn inwards, stop engaging in things I enjoy doing because of those with malicious intent who gain pleasure from tearing people down? When I took down my YouTube channels many people emailed me and said I was “letting them win.” I am still struggling with this idea. I was not making videos to “win” anything. I don’t have blogs to score first place in some internet race. I made videos simply because I enjoyed doing them, and they seemed to help some people, and those two things together made me happy.

My blogs motivate me to write. When I slack off, I know they are sitting out there, testaments to what I am capable of achieving but currently ignoring. Many times I come to this or my other online homes with no idea what I am going to write, or photograph, or say in front of a camera. Many times I have no motivation beyond the idea that I committed to starting this “thing,” and I should really keep up with it. But I start speaking, or writing, or taking pictures, and the content comes. This, to me, is the magic of the online communities within which I exist. The possibility of an instant audience is, in its essence, a gift. It is a blessing. One for which I am very grateful.

No audience is perfect however. There are always hecklers. There are always those whose desires do not match my own; who have an agenda I cannot understand but also cannot completely avoid. The truth is these spaces have never been sacred by the sole fact of their existence. It is what I bring to them that makes them so. If others bring negativity, insanity, or drama instead – well then, the internet and my space within it can become that to them. But it does not have to taint my connection to them as inspiring and important elements of my life.

There is a risk in putting myself out here for others to see that is somewhat different from what I thought it was before. I always knew my poetry could get stolen, or people could dislike what I wrote enough to leave unkind words in response to my work. What I didn’t know was that people can come here who do not respect any aspect of it; my hard work, my self-expression, my research, my struggle to communicate ideas of which even I am unclear. If nothing else, I can become more aware of my own vulnerability and resist the temptation to either hide away or fight back, as if those are the only two options available to me. They are people I do not understand, after all, and it is that which makes them frightening to me. Understanding them does not include behaving as they do or condoning such ugliness; but it does mean feeling less shocked and threatened by it all.

So the theme for the month is “Returning” – to my online homes, the communities that help keep them strong, and the aspects of myself that make me feel whole. I am engaging in Fiona and Kaspa’s “River of Stones” project for the month of January, and in doing so hope to build this space back up into what it was becoming before my confidence and sense of security were shaken. But – and this is important to note – I will do so wisely, with a deeper awareness of how vast the internet is and how its inherent neutrality can be used to negative ends as easily as it can for positive ones. I now know I am not wholly “safe” hanging out here in the virtual world, and hope to protect myself accordingly. I am thinking here not as much of this blog as of others I run, but I will remember it here too. I will return to this blog and my others, but wiser and better prepared for whatever negativity I might encounter.

I just hit ‘publish’ when I meant to hit ‘save draft’ on a new poem I’m working on. I thought about leaving it up for email subscribers who get the rough draft in their inboxes and come looking for it, but dammit, it’s nowhere NEAR complete. For starters, there’s supposed to be a videopoem that goes with it that I haven’t even started putting together yet. And I just wrote the first draft tonight. So I decided to take the post down. Sorry subscribers for the confusion. But that poem just isn’t ready yet. Oops.

There’s probably a more creative way to name these topics, but honestly, I’m lazy, and I’m more interested in getting the poems together and posting them than creating a clever topic title. I should probably call this “person vs. nature” but I learned the concept using gender-biased language, and I’ve never been able to get used to addressing it any other way.

I have a video poem in the works; it’s just finding the time to work on it with the new semester and an internship starting up this fall. But it should be done soon. I also have more photos to add, and a ton of ideas, but again, I have to be patient with them. I used to feel like if I didn’t strike while an idea was hot, I’d lose it forever, and that was a stressful way to create. I don’t need that kind of urgency in my life. So now, I am content to let ideas simmer, to jot them down somewhere and store them away, until I have time to get back to them. I’ve found that the motivation and inspiration doesn’t die because you file it away for later, and that in fact some of those ideas I might have felt obligated to see through to the end would have been a bust anyway, because they weren’t very good. So in a way, forcing my creativity into my schedule actually saves me a lot of wasted energy.

I was considering organizing my showcase page thematically, perhaps changing it each week, including photos and poems related to the week’s theme – and videos as well, if they align with the topic. However, once I start getting too organized, I start feeling pressured, and this whole thing begins to feel more like a chore than something fun. What I foresee happening is such a structure starting out easy enough, then getting more difficult as time goes by and I begin running out of themes, not to mention photos and videos and poems to correspond with them. So maybe that’s being overly ambitious for now. I may settle for taking the “about” information away from the showcase page, putting it in its own section, and putting a slideshow of photos at the top instead. I’ve noticed in the past week that the photographs section is the most ignored, so maybe it needs a little extra advertising. However, I’m not sure what photos to feature. I’ll have to think on that for a bit.

I’m still working on my second video poem, which will be every bit as bargain-basement as the first. I can’t bring myself to learn new technology until I’ve completely exhausted the possibilities of what I already know, and that hasn’t happened yet with Movie Maker. I have an idea for an audiopoem as well, but I must get over how much I dislike hearing my own voice. I may run myself through the VoicePlus iPhone software Deb Morbeto uses to read my poems in her videos; distorting my voice may make me more comfortable hearing it.

This weekend I’ve been photographing old watercolor and oil pastel pieces I created about 10 years ago and editing them on my computer. For me right now photography is the easiest medium in which to work – immediate results and a fun editing process. So I’m a little bummed that my pictures are getting the least attention here, but anybody who comes here intentionally is probably primarily looking for poetry anyway. I intend to incorporate photography into my poems as well, but I think that’s a little far into the future for now. I haven’t latched onto any clear ideas of what I would do; I just know it’s do-able in some way.