The Writing of Articles and the Removing of Clothes

I have a pet project that I am selfishly pursuing. This project has been haunting me, but I have a feeling that it will never be completed. I'm finding new ways to be frightened of pursuing publicity, especially now that I'm teaching in the University environment. I used to think that whatever career I ended up in, it should give me a really substantial amount of creative independence. To be, you know, all avant-garde and pushing-the-envelope-y. It should, I thought, be incredible if I could pursue a respected course of employment and also be just about as intellectually bizarre as possible. I grew up thinking, at great length, that really special, smart people get all sorts of breaks. And my really special, smart people were writers and poets and artists that made some of their living in the University. 

But I'm not really special or smart. I work hard and have a degree of innate intelligence that I've cultivated through years of reading, writing, and listening. It's gotten me to where I am, so far, but I am naive to think that just because I'm working in an environment where tattoos and piercings and funny hair is par for the course, this aesthetic "liberation" means I am free to experiment with my brand of poetry and prose. 

I know everyone has figurative skeletons in their closet, but most people don't dream of building a career on those skeletons, of dressing those skeletons up in deceptively lovely language and parading them around. I write about sadness and anger, about sexual abuse and alcohol abuse, about gruesome acts and even grosser conditions. This is not in itself unique, and I inherit a rich tradition of this type of poetic discourse. But I'm 26 years old, and I'm trying to teach freshmen in college how to write. Robert Lowell could, ostensibly, go to the psych ward in peace, but today, we can't (if we want to write about it [online]). Also, I am not Robert Lowell. 

Self-expression can be very cathartic for me. It can also be terrible because by articulating psychic discontent, I give it an imposed, intellectualizing order. This project, however, does not have order; it doesn't know what it wants to be and wants to be all things: academic journal piece, rant, op-ed, confession. And while working on this project, I've also discovered a renewed hatred for an abusive ex-boyfriend (because, in no small part, he inspired the project). This further complicates things. 

Another issue: I don't feel free to write this work, perhaps in the way that I am not free to teach The Marquis in freshman composition courses (a colleague/friend of mine got a proverbial spanking for that one). Throughout my life, the one political issue I have been consistently supportive of is freedom of speech and whatever other discourses/media lie under that increasingly broad category. Of course, teaching at a private University necessarily limits constitutionality. 

Also, I have a gripe with what society considers legitimate employment (strippers need not apply), and how juggling two disparate jobs often forces one to compromise desires, needs, and flights of fancy. To be perfectly clear, I think that dancing and sexual expression is important, and, as a result of a rather repressed adolescence, I feel passionate about encouraging women to find outlets for exploring alternative erotics. If I lived in a perfect world, I would love to teach writing and literature to college students by day and perform burlesque by night. By distinguishing between burlesque and between stripping, I am not necessarily creating a hierarchy, but merely revealing my own personal comfort level. What I love about burlesque - the storytelling inherent in a performance, the kitsch, the history, the range of body types and personal aesthetic choices, the weirdness, the female-friendly audience - is missing from conventional striptease. I was a classically trained ballerina for 14 years before quitting due to lousy self-esteem, and I still have an inherent rhythm and love for all things performative, especially costuming and makeup. 

So thus exists my occupational fantasy, which is absolutely incongruent with my chosen profession. And thus also exists the problem with my project - deciding on whether I want to clearly draw the line between the personal and the academic or smudge it.