March 17, 2007 (personal)

I remember that time. I was working at Ask Jeeves, which has since (irritatingly) renamed itself Ask.com. Which would be far less irritating if they didn't put out commercials where people said "Why don't you ask Ask?" Oh fuck does that make me shudder.

My friend Jean sent around a link to Your hands do the work of 10,000 highly trained lesbian jumping beans. The title delighted me and the hardlinks sucked me in. I immediately learned how to hop around the site reading whatever I wanted, learning more and more about it all with each link. It took me a lot longer to learn that I could read a softlink by hovering over it instead of clicking on it and then having to hit "back". Sometime well before that, all my hopping through the queer nodes led me to conclude that there was a real dearth of transgendered material on here, and sign up just to chuck some in. I've always been proud that my first writeup hasn't been deleted yet, although it sure needs polishing.

I made plenty of mistakes early on, especially posting writeup after writeup my first day and wondering why I was getting so viciously downvoted - until someone was kind enough to explain to me that people get really annoyed when one user fills up New Writeups. (Don't display in "New Writeups")? Are you nuts? Then I won't get any attention! What's the point of writing if nobody ever sees it? I'm not a fucking Zen koan over here.

I think that's always been my mistake with E2. Noding for attention. I can't help it, it's a disease! I've done a lot of work over the past lo these many years to let go of that need for approval, the sweet high of those upvotes and the buzz of the C!s. At some point I got more interested in /msged feedback than the shiny shiny points. But I still have that inner child whine sometimes - I know this is good! How come it's at +21/-9?

Obviously, the attention is like a drug in another way - I need more and more of it to be satisfied. I know from experience that I'll only really be satisfied by my own approval. Getting 4 or 7 or 12 C!s on a writeup so that I am willing to momentarily believe that my writing must be good because other people think so is marvelously codependent and only a temporary fix.

And as my desire for more points was growing, my standards for myself grew along with it. At some point I noticed that all my recent writeups had gotten C!ed, and I resolved to keep it that way. It wasn't enough for my writing to be fun anymore, because I wasn't writing for me. It wasn't enough that I might learn something new or fill a hole in the nodegel. And I didn't even notice for a long time. I thought that it was because we had raised the bar, the bar kept going up, that now writeups had to be lavishly formatted, decadently long, able to capture and keep the reader's attention like a chapter of a book. That it wasn't worth just whipping out something quick and true to fill a cavity.

The reality, I realize now, was that those smaller, quicker writeups would have gotten the same kind of votes that they always had, as others' did. That +24/-4 and 1 C! is damn good for an 800-word writeup that I crapped out at work. That whoever said maybe we just need to let ourselves have fun with it all again was right, or at least they were right about what I need.

The funny thing, to me, is that I left E2 for about two years. I've posted six things since the last Presidential election, many of which I had already written for other sources. Mostly, I left because I lost interest: not because of anything E2 had done, but because I had a soul-killing office job which was slowly draining all the creative energy I had. Any energy I had left was going toward handling drama with my abusive co-parent, handling drama created by my psycho boss, having full-time custody of my kid, and fighting for guardianship of my kid. And the funny thing about it is that when I came back, nothing seemed any different. I hear a lot of people talk about how people were meaner, the community hung together less, it was all different. But I never experienced that. Maybe it's because I don't hang out in the catbox, because that tiny square that it happens in changes too fast for me. If I could scroll back and post in the same window, it would be different. As it is, my E2 life is all about posting, reading, and usergroups.

So I've been thinking. I see these big debates and blow-ups and announcements when they happen, but I never post anything. By the time I get to the end of the daylogs, I realize that all the perspectives are amply represented and that as always it seems to boil down to everyone talking and then everything being okay again. And it makes me realize... I don't participate in E2 the way I want to.

It's the fun thing. I spent last year working to let go of fear, guilt, shame, and controlling assholes. My New Year's Resolution this year is to bring more fun and joy into my life. I've noticed that I can't do that without letting go of all the tight, restrictive old fears... just as I can't have the fun I want here without letting go of my shame, fear of not being good enough, whatever you want to call it, and doing it out of the joy of writing what I want and being myself.

Do you want to know what I love about e2?

• The quests. All those incredibly creative and inspiring challenges, the glittering prizes, the lists of awesome new things to read under each one, the amazing beauty of even just the quest writeup itself.
• The usergroups. Outies, ninjagirls, e2parents, e2pandas, NoCal, recipians, greenfingers, mentors, helpline, nanowrimo, and all the ones I'm not a member of yet too.
• Writing anything I want. Sharing it. Getting feedback and ideas on it. The camaraderie and support around writing.
• Doing the same for others - the joy of telling them what I love about what they've written, and helping with typos and such.
• The community - hearing about other noders' marriages, turning points in their lives, finding people with shared interests and experiences.
• The catbox - I might not be able to hang out there for any reasonable amount of time, but whenever I check in there is somebody saying something completely hilarious.

That's probably not all. But you know what I've always wished I could do here?

• I've always wanted to participate enough that everyone knows me. I want to be some kind of a byword. A byword for something good.
• I want to keep up my friendships here, and everywhere else. I want to appreciate people more, and make a point of enjoying their company and putting some energy into our relationships, whether I went to college with them or just know them as pixels on a screen.
• I want to host a nodermeet, and go to a nodermeet. I want fun and debauchery and to actually participate in this place.
• I've always wanted to be an m-noder!

What passport said made me think. "Some of you have been around long enough to remember back when people used to aspire to that. The term rarely gets used any more though, since writing 1000 nodes in the modern E2 seems like an almost impossible task."

If I posted one and one-quarter writeups a day, I would become an M-noder at the end of 2008. Hell, that asshole wouldn't even be officially out of office by then.

I'm going to do it. I'm posting something every single day. You're my witness. I'm going to start taking part in E2 the way I've always wanted to.