Exposed, Emily Gould

Blog-Post Confidential

Emily Gould feature in NY Times Magazine, 5.25.08

Sit down with the Sunday Times planning on skimming, racing through the news, week in review, book section, etc., and getting on to The Day. Stuff that needs to get done. My To Do list. Instead, get caught up with Emily Gould's "Blog-Post Confidential" feature. Then see how, for me at least, it connects with panic attacks, depression and, strange as it may sound, soul-retrieval. I haven't forgotten what this blog, drswardscureformelancholia, is about, and skirt the issue as I may, it's there. As is the idea of a cure, namely, that the cure for melancholia (dramatic and implausible as that may sound) is to be found in the recovery of...

If psychology is the study of the soul, psyche (soul or spirit) - ology (the study of), some think the "answer," if there is an answer, is in the recovery of what has been lost. Speaking from experience, zombie-days, zombie-hood, well, I've been writing about that in the new book*. And the intersection between zombie-hood and what, for want of a better term, I call "soul retrieval." There's at least one book on the subject, a book titled "Soul Retrieval." So, I'm not the first and there's nothing original in what I'm suggesting. Anyway, back to the Sunday Times. I highlight a couple items from Emily Gould's "Exposed."

1. "I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept...

2. "But because we were so busy, we continued to I.M. most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type 'Hahahahahaha' in lieu of actually laughing.

3. "I was initially put off by Julia' naked attention-whoring--'Attention is my drug,' she often confessed.

4. "A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom in the Gawker office... felled by a panic attack that put me out of commission for the rest of the day.

Famous for 15 people

5. "Whenever I left this comfort zone, I would be seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal from my fellow subway passengers or pedestrians. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign of having one, everyone would pay attention to me."

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* Sample of work on the subject appears now in Bear Flag Republic, Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young. Four of my poems in this anthology, including "A Face to Sadden God" -- with a section which begins, "There are three parts to the human soul..."