Dopp Juice

The other thing that came up in my conversations with Emma today was ego and its relationship to creativity and public presence. Basically, when my inflated ego is running the show, my work kinda sucks. But when I can skirt under its radar and stay decently humble, I can do wonderful things.

I got hit in the head with this fact about five years ago when I was living on the East Coast and calling myself a “poet.” I was performing frequently, winning slams (competitions), influencing local arts culture, and being told daily how amazing I was. My ego inflated to the size of a rhinoceros, and then — almost immediately — something horrible happened: I stopped writing poetry for three years.

It was the kind of writer’s block that I’ve heard referred to as Superstar Syndrome: I felt like I couldn’t top my own work. I had become so invested in the identity of being impressive that I lost all willingness to make mistakes. It felt safer to create nothing than to risk creating something less-than-awesome.

Fast forward to now, where I’m slowly inching my toes back into the poetry pool (the water’s nice!), and playing around in Social Media sandbox. I’m aware that I’m mumbling into a megaphone with all these fancy tools, toys, and words, and that I don’t get to control the outcomes. Occasionally I get hit with an ego bomb that catches me completely off guard, and I’m reminded to check in with my intentions.

Encouragement is helpful and I usually need some kind of validation, but I also have to constantly work to find a safe balance in my self-image. It’s not something I can just “fix” — it’s constant maintenance. It’s spiritual grounding. It’s remembering that we’re all equal. It’s remembering that when other people give me attention, it’s not about me; it’s about them.

But oooh…. look at all my shiny twitter followers… Look! I must be awesome!

Down, girl. Sit. Stay.

As the conversation with Emma today dug deeper, I remembered a process someone explained to me a year ago around working through resentments. It goes something like this:

1. Who am I resentful at and why?
2. What does this affect in my life?
3. Am I willing to try to show this person the same tolerance, pity, and patience that I’d give a sick friend?
4. What’s my part in this situation? How did I add to it?
5. Have I been telling myself that I’m right and they’re wrong? (Yes…)
6. Am I using this sense of superiority to gain self-esteem or power? (*sigh* okay, yes….)
7. Am I doing this because I’m afraid that the “regular” me is not enough? (i don’t want to admit this, but, yeah, sure, okay, that’s one way of looking at it…)
8. They didn’t act right. What values could they have been acting with instead?
9. How can I work on strengthening those values in my own life?
10. I’m grateful that I have this obstacle to practice on.

Questions #8 and #9 go together and require a lot of thoughtfulness, honesty, and humility (which I can tap into if I paid attention during #4-#7). If I can find an overlap between What They Suck At and What I Probably Oughta Work On, I’ve hit on where I need to put my focus. Then something magical happens (or I need to lather, rinse, repeat), and the resentment starts to fade away.

Try it sometime. Let me know how it works for you.

I have a lot I want to talk about tonight, so I’m gonna break it up into a few posts.

I spent the day hanging out with Emma McCreary, who was in town for a few days from Portland. She and I have had parallel keep-an-eye-on-each-other lives since we first did business together five years ago, and we’ve managed to become close friends almost entirely through blogging. We only met in person for the first time last month, so it’s extra exciting that I got to hang out with her again today. It also didn’t surprise me that — in between art-climbing adventures and ultrathick milkshakes — we skipped the small talk and went straight to philosophical discussions about how we interact with the world.

Emma studies Non-Violent Communication (and other happiness-inducing practices), and has picked up some helpful ways of explaining how we humans deal with stuff. Here were some of the nuggets I stole from our conversation (mostly for my own memory, but you can eavesdrop):

• Letting your body fully experience difficult emotions is the easiest way to clear them away.
• Being in a relationship is like looking into a Fun House mirror. You think you’re looking at someone else, but you’re really looking at yourself.
• We usually try to get all of our needs met with one strategy. We’re better off if we try to get each need met with lots of strategies.
• If you need to say “no” to someone, start by telling them what you’re saying “yes” to, and they’ll be able to hear the “no” much better.
• When someone compliments you, they’re usually letting you know you helped fill one of their needs.

Good nuggets. Thank you, Emma.

There’s a sour taste floating around in the mouths of personal bloggers right now because of a recent article in the New York Times. I don’t want to add to the negative criticism of the article; I want to join the positive backlash. I want to tell you why I write about my life on the Internet.

Last week something kind of amazing happened. I put out a casual request for people who have a certain kind of personality and lifestyle to poke me and say hi, and 46 people responded over the course of two days. It sparked a bunch of conversations about language and identity, and pulled some people together in a way that none of us expected. Even more surprising were the private conversations I had with people who wanted to raise their hands, but didn’t want other people to know about it. There were a lot of these, and they completely floored me.

I write about my life on the Internet because it creates a space for these connections. What else could make a complete stranger feel safe emailing me to say, “I’m queer, and I can’t tell anyone, but I wanted to tell you“?

I’ve been writing about my life on the Internet for about nine years now. I’ve learned by trial-and-error what works and what doesn’t, and I manage my presence in a way that nourishes me. Sometimes I make mistakes and have to face negative consequences, but they’ve never come anywhere close to outweighing the benefits.

In January, I bought a car almost entirely on advice from my online social networks, which I got in response to my blog posts about how confused I was. Someone even found my dream car for me online and sent me the link. Someone else saw that I couldn’t get to the dealership and offered to drive me. Some of these people (like the guy who gave me a ride) are meatspace friends, while others (like the guy who sent me the link) are people I only know online — I met them by blogging. (And by the way, the car is still perfect.)

I write about my life on the Internet because it changes the way I connect with my own experiences. In order to write down a story, I have to sort through all of the details and focus on the ones that made it significant for me. I believe our stories shape us — the way we remember something affects who we are and how we relate to the world. Writing things down empowers me to consciously decide how I want to remember something, and to me, that’s an act of personal revolution. Then, when details get echoed back to me in someone else’s words — either through a comment or another blog post — my way of seeing things gets a little big stronger, and my voice gets a little bit more steady.

I also write about my life on the Internet because I like to spend time alone. I can spend entire days in physical solitude — writing or working or scheming or exploring — and the Internet gives me a way to stay accountable and honest without breaking the creativity spell. It’s a kind of safety net — if I stopped writing for a day or two and didn’t tell anyone where I was, people would start looking for me (I know this because it’s happened). It’s also a sanity check — I can’t escape too far off into my own little world because I’m still bouncing my thoughts off a network of real people. When I start talking crazy talk, people tell me. (And they seem to love that part of their job, too…)

I’ve worked through some very hard stuff through blogging, and I’ve made some powerful connections in the process. People have thanked me for telling stories that opened doors in their own lives that they didn’t know they were missing out on. Other bloggers have done the same for me.

I believe in telling stories, I believe we’re more powerful when we’re connected, and I believe in telling fear to f*ck off.

Running to the warm night beach before the sky loses all of its pink and the water fades from sapphire to black. 8:52pm

I found magic, and its tide is up. 8:53pm

Standing here alone. I’ve never seen the SF ocean so gorgeous. Want to share it. It smells like sushi. I have no camera. You’re missing it. 8:59pm

Right now, I get it. We’re building all these tools so we can connect everything because connection is the only way anything feels right. 9:02pm

I’m standing feet firm in the sand, dumbstruck that i’m talking to people who have no idea how this air feels, and that I can’t change that. 9:09pm

And at the same time, this conversation puts this experience into my narrative. Because you’re listening, I will remember this. 9:11pm

Our stories are stronger when others interact with them. I can spend entire days alone because I’ve created an audience that isn’t here. 9:17pm

I feel like my reality is changing in a direction I have too much control over. If my experience is so explicitly narrated, my ego owns me. 9:26pm

The sky and the water are both dark grey blue now, both highlighted with specks and streaks of white. But you only know cuz i’m telling you. 9:32pm

If I stand on my tiptoes and sink my feet in deep, the sand is still warm from the heat today. Even tho my head is getting cold from wet air 9:43pm

I’m still here. If you were here, you’d stay, too. But maybe only cuz I’d tell you why you should. I live-narrate meaning in meatspace, too. 10:00pm

Ok, so I don’t have more control. I just have a stronger filter on my perceptions because I have more tools to narrate and frame experience. 10:03pm

And I’ve totally disregarded my self-censoring limits on reasonable twitter frequency and intimacy tonight… making this even more surreal. 10:10pm

Before I walk away, you should know that the waves are moving like that nylon parachute you stood around in gym class and made ripples with. 10:14pm

That’s all. 10:14pm

Have you seen this man?

He stole my new Nokia N95 — the one the nice word-of-mouth marketing people sent me for free to play with and chatter about. I was gonna poke it and prod it and take pictures with it and compare it to the Treo and the iPhone and try to break it.

But now I can’t, because a crazy road raging maniac with mad scientist hair* stole it from me.

Fortunately, he’s willing to discuss the matter with me openly on the Internet.

So I give you a new blog: iwantmyN95back.blogspot.com

*The guy who stole my phone’s name is Mark Resch. Coincidentally, he also works in my office. So he’s walking around with the phone in front of me, and not letting me touch it. It’s not very nice.

Tags: iwantmyn95back, mark resch, n95, nokia wom, phone thief

The following article will appear in Riseup.net‘s upcoming educational publication about safety and security in online organizing. You get to have the sneak peak here.

Blogging with Split Personalities:
How I Created and Reconciled My Separate Spaces On the Web
by Sarah Dopp

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m a compulsive blogger. It all started in high school when I created a website under a pseudonym and used it to tell stories about my love life. It was a thrilling and introspective project that resulted in a lot of great writing. Unfortunately, though, I was so terrified someone would connect it to me that I never saved a backup copy. That website has since expired, and those words are now lost forever in the murky underbelly of the Internet. First lesson learned: If I’m not going to claim something, I can’t hold onto it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, identity, persona management, riseup, security

On the last day of adventuring, my dopp juice gave to me…

Twelve days of traveling,

Eleven kinds of sushi,

Ten poems unchallenged,

Nine missing work days,

Eight beds and couches.

Seven artists scheming

Six different airports,

Five grandparents!

Four different states,

Three major cities,

Two stage performances,

And a spontaneous convergence of ukuleles in a taqueria!

(photos include my brother, Chris Dopp, who is graduating from college this year! w00t!)

My weekend! Let me show you it!

(photos by emchy and liz henry… cuz my own camera’s battery died.)

Tags: can i sit with you, ciswy, poets, portland, seattle

Tomorrow morning I’m climbing into a bumper-sticker-covered car with Liz Henry and Cindy Emch and driving to Portland, Oregon by way of the redwood forests. Once we arrive we’ll jump out of the car, run around the city, party like we’ve joined the circus, sleep like rocks, wake up like birds, jump back into the car, and keep driving until we’ve made it to Seattle.

Then we’ll all scramble onto a stage with some other fantastic writers and read stories about childhood trauma to an eager paying audience of “Can I Sit With You?” fans. If you’ll be anywhere near Seattle on Friday night (April 25), you seriously need to get a ticket and come to this. It’s going to be amazing. (And you can see my story here.)

Several days, a whole lot of partying, and a decent number of hours in a hot tub later, I’ll catch a red eye flight to Boston and then grab a bus up to New Hampshire, where I’ll hang out with my family for a few days. During this time, I’ll turn 25. This will be celebrated in a manner that will rival Christmas.

After I revel in the legitimacy of my new age bracket for a day, I’ll head over to the UNH region for the Annual Writ Summit with the rest of the site‘s core staff. It will be a loosely-organized weekend of meetings, arts events, reconnecting, and brainstorming about what to do next with this brilliant grassroots website monster that refuses to die. I’ve heard rumors about a reunion poetry slam and open mic that Friday night, which would be crazy fun. If you’re in the area and you want to join in on the festivities, ping me and I’ll send you more details.

I’ll fly back to San Francisco on Tuesday, May 6th, where I will promptly find a large rock and hide under it for a week. I’ll come out from under that rock only for a few hours on Friday, May 9th, to celebrate my birthday at the Queer Open Mic and with a drinks outing afterward. You’re all invited.

The best way to keep track of me right now is by watching my Twitter feed. The best way to contact me is through telepathy (if that doesn’t work, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to settle for less reliable alternatives).

Any questions?

Tags: can i sit with you, ciswy, Road TRIP! Road TRIP! Road TRIP!, the writ