On Focus

Three weeks ago, something very strange happened. I got a text from one of my oldest friends – a groomsman at our wedding, who I’ve known since I was 16 – to say that he’d found my blog. This blog. While my brain desperately tried to process the information (and my heart froze for the best part of 10 minutes), he gleefully explained that a chance reference to ‘The Other Livvy’ on someone else’s site had rapidly led him to her, and of course then to me.

“Don’t worry though,” he signed off. “Your secret is as safe as it ever was ?”

An attempt at reassurance, no doubt (and a sincere one), but his message stayed with me that night and intermittently throughout the week, as I tried to decide how I felt about this sudden breach of the admittedly flimsy wall between ‘Exhibit A’ and the rest of my life.

It’s actually more accurate to call it a two-way mirror than a wall. I’ve never made it too difficult for any nosy (or malicious) individuals on here to crack my secret identity. I allowed myself to be blackmailed into closing a sex blog 14 years ago, and told myself at the time that I would never let it happen again. As this blog really took off in 2014/15, I reflected on that decision, and realised that I had three options open to me: I could be open about my identity from the start; I could lock down my anonymity as tightly as possible; or I could operate in a grey area somewhere between the two, and just accept that at some stage I might get outed. I wasn’t brave enough to do the first of those, I wasn’t willing to drive myself crazy trying to do the second, so shrugged my shoulders and embraced the third.

In that sense, I’m operating from a position of privilege. I’m not going to lose my job if someone outs me. There would be a few awkward and embarrassing conversations – not least with parents – but I’m now confident enough in myself and my lifestyle to push back at anyone who tries to weaponise the things I write about and post on here.

So for some time now, I’ve let people on one side of the line peer – and even step – across to the other. That pretty much started with Liv: it’s kinda hard to fall in love and start a serious relationship with someone you met through your sex blog without at some point introducing them to your family and friends.

As our kinky social circle grew wider, and especially as some of the connections we made blossomed into true friendships, we grew bolder in our blurring of worlds. Trusted individuals were added to Facebook and Instagram. Invited to engagement and birthday parties. A small cohort of bloggers even attended our wedding – and of course Martha’s naming ceremony last week. To them, a light was deliberately and happily shone across pretty much the entirety of our lives, and I don’t regret that for one second.

However, for those on the other side of the line – my family, colleagues, hockey team-mates, school friends, former lovers – the mirror largely remained intact. Everyone knows that Liv and I ‘met on Twitter’, but most people are remarkably incurious when it comes to details. Even when the odd crack appeared, familial and professional relationships are designed to maintain a convenient mutual silence/distance around the subject of sex. Naked photos on your bedroom wall? Pin badges and mugs covered in sex toy branding or filthy slogans? A bookcase filled with erotic fiction in the spare room? You can hide all sorts of things in plain sight when you’re confident that your private life will be treated as exactly that: private. I trusted those social conventions to protect me from awkward questions, and to cut off any public scrutiny of my online activity before it really got going.

And y’know what? That approach worked perfectly well – until it didn’t.

So once the initial shock had passed, how did I feel about my friend’s revelation? Honestly? I felt ashamed.

Not because he’d seen me (and Liv) naked. Nor because he knew far more about our lifestyle (and my sexual history/fantasies/fetishes) than I’d ever felt comfortable sharing with those on ‘the other side of the line’. That all is what it is, and as I said, I knew this kind of thing might happen one day.

No, the shame I felt at that moment had nothing to do with the nature of any content on my blog – it was the frequency and quality of the content that bothered me. Not because I’m a crap writer – I’ve never doubted my ability to write decent prose, and I have enough of a creative/professional ego to know that when I’m good, I’m very good – but because the best of my work on here feels like it’s buried too far back for most people to find.

God, it’s even more depressing when I write it down like that. And I accept that my view on this won’t be shared by everyone. There will be people out there who really loved this post from early January, or who thought my musings on orgasm self-denial were fascinating enough to have them coming back each day in the hope of finding fresh new insight. However, I think they’ll be the exceptions. For me, reflecting on the last eight months of blogging is an uncomfortable and unhappy experience. After a purple patch at the beginning of September, I’ve published the following:

• 9 Sinful Sunday/photo posts
• 4 ‘essays’ about sex
• 3 guest posts
• 3 Smut Marathon recaps
• 2 posts about my own sex life
• 1 piece of fiction
• 1 toy review
• Eroticon Meet & Greet

So that’s 24 posts in total. 24 posts in 35 weeks, but if you strip out the photos, the guest posts, the Smut Marathon recaps, and the Meet & Greet – all the things that feel like they demand very little actual writing on my part – that drops to a measly eight. Or basically one a month. Looking back through my archives, in 2015 I published that many written posts between 23^rd July and 29^th August alone (and most of them were good!). And that was literally the first time period I picked – I could find multiple other examples of occasions in the past when I’ve been that prolific.

At this point, it’s worth making one thing clear: yes, I realise just how navel-gazey and ridiculous this post is. If you’ve made it this far, you’re either someone who likes me a LOT, someone who seriously dislikes me, or someone with a little too much time on your hands. Either way, thank you – and hi!

What’s the point of being a blogger though, if you can’t navel-gaze from time-to-time? And what better reason to do it than the shifting of plates beneath your feet that takes place when a light is unexpectedly (and uncomfortably) shone across your entire body of work.

“Go back!”, I wanted to text him the following the day. “Go back to 2016. To 2014! Read this and this and this, because I can write, honestly I can!” Imposter syndrome made my fingers twitch for most of the day, and has returned periodically since then, as I’ve debated what to do next. I don’t yet have the answer to that one, but I know what I’m not going to do, and that’s walk away from blogging, or close the shutters on this site and migrate somewhere new under a different identity. This is part of who I am now. Without Exhibit A, I’d never have met Liv – nor a whole bunch of the friends, lovers, and miscellaneous interesting characters who have made my life richer over the last few years. Giving up all of that would feel like an act of self-harm.

It’s undeniably true though that my priorities have changed since 2016, and certainly since 2014. This eight-month (relative) drought has coincided with the last few, impatient weeks of pregnancy, and of course with the beginning of parenthood. Between Baby Martha, work, commuting, hockey, running, wider family, and marriage – all of which require time, thought, effort, and an active presence – there hasn’t really been much time for writing. Add in the fact that I don’t have a study or even a proper desk at home, so frequently find myself fleeing to the nearest café or pub whenever I want to open my laptop without distraction, and it’s perhaps no wonder that my output has been low/sporadic.

None of that is meant to sound like a complaint. I’m aware that a lot of this boils down to personal choice. It was my decision to keep playing hockey after Martha (Exhibit B?) was born, swallowing up 4-8 hours of every Saturday since mid-January. My decision to go out running 3-4 times a week, and my decision to go out with friends or see other partners, rather than setting aside precious free evenings to work on my blog. If I haven’t chosen to write much recently, isn’t that just a sign that it’s slipped down my priority list, and that I ought to adjust my own expectations accordingly?

Well: yes and no.

Yes, because everything has been bumped down my priority list since Martha arrived. Liv’s written about this already, but even our relationship has been flicked onto power-saving mode at times, with both of us acknowledging that for these next few months we’ll have to get by with slightly less of each other, as Martha greedily sucks up all the time and love we’re able to give her.

In every other sense though, I don’t think this is about priority. Not relative priority, anyway. (Wait for it: after 1,600+ words, I’m finally getting to the meat of this post.) While I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say here in response to my friend’s message, I realised that a lot of my general frustration about writing is tied up in a realisation that I do have the time, and I do have the desire, and I do have the ideas – I just don’t have the focus.

In her latest ‘Poly Wobbles’ post, Liv writes about motherhood that:

“I also hate it because the more I become her mother, the less I know who else I am […] Things that were second nature or easy for me before feel distant; self-esteem, self-image, self-confidence. Self anything really. They all feel like they need work, like I need to work to find myself again. As if I’m not important right now and my self can be forgotten in favour of my need to be a mother.”

As a father – a working father – my experience of these first few months has necessarily been different to hers. In my speech at Martha’s naming ceremony earlier this month, I said that the best 10 minutes of my day immediately precedes the worst. That’s because after waking up to huge, (largely) toothless smiles and excited squeaks, I have to wave my two favourite people goodbye and go to work. And it’s shit. Even at this early stage in her life, I’m aware of how much I’m missing in the 8-10 hours I’m gone. First roll from back to stomach. First biscuit. In time, perhaps her first word or the first time she walks. All the sleepy cuddles and playtime that dominate a small baby’s day-to-day existence.

As a result, I’ve avoided wrapping myself too tightly in ‘fatherhood’ as an identity. Unlike Liv, I’ve actively retained my sense of self, because to surrender it without the same 24/7 access to our child that she’s taken on would feel achingly hollow. I would miss those moments even more than I do already. So while I absolutely love being a dad, from the day I went back to work in January I’ve found ways to mute that feeling when necessary (or to turn down the volume, at least) – as an act of self-preservation. I need other things in my life to have meaning too, and I need to feel like I’m more than a parent; if I didn’t, how awful would those 40-50 hours away from her each week be?

And don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have that break sometimes! I could write a whole other thing about the psychological impact on new dads of the cultural expectation that they’ll go back to work right away and leave the hard yakka of early parenting to mum, but I’m not going to pretend there aren’t upsides too.

The net result though is that while Liv is adjusting to a state in which her energy and focus are largely being channelled in one direction, I’ve spent the last six months feeling stretched apart. More work, more responsibilities, less time, less sleep; more joy, more love, more utter terror; more brimming, swelling emotion to hold onto when I can and push down inside me when I can’t.

I’m used to spreading myself too thin (in fact, I enjoy it!), but crucially I’ve always been great at compartmentalising – at focusing on the task, person, or activity in hand, even when I know there are a hundred other things demanding my attention. I can’t do that any more – not in the same way, nor to the same extent. I might be able to mute the parent identity at times, but that just squeezes everything else together somehow and it’s exhausting! It’s also very ‘noisy’, from a mental point of view, which is the exact opposite of what I need when I sit down to write. Or even when I have an idea for a blog post/story and think about sitting down to write. There are just too many things going on right now.

In July 2015, or March 2016, or whenever, I knew that for every 10 half-decent/interesting/speculative ideas I had for a blog post or story, I’d find a way to write something down for 5-6 of them. Until I’m able to recapture the level of focus I had back then – even just in short bursts – I’ll continue to find writing difficult. Good writing, anyway. The slightly scary thing is that I don’t know how or when that’ll happen, but I think it’s something I need to force myself to do. If only so that the next time someone from ‘real life’ finds my blog, I don’t have to worry that what they’re reading isn’t up to scratch.