The Black Album

Not surprisingly, I am going to start with a musical analogy.

In 1987, following the critical and commercial success of Sign of the Times, Prince was on the verge of releasing a deeply funky but dark, misogynistic, and violent album to be entitled The Funk Bible. Then, a week before release, he pulled the album. Due to the fact that the handful of promo copies that went out were in an unmarked black sleeve, the record became known as The Black Album and was widely bootlegged. A few months later, he followed up with a poppy fruit loop of a record called Lovesexy which featured him naked on the cover in a picture that had to have been taken at a glamour shot at the local mall.



Legend has it that Prince became dissatisfied with the tone of The Black Album and had second thoughts about releasing something he perceived as negative into the world.

If you read this blog regularly, you probably noticed a few missing entries. I'm pretty sure that in the blogging world this is uncool but frankly I am unconcerned with such 'blogma' (you see what I did there). Yesterday I got a lot of hits for what I had written about glam journals. I still believe in what I wrote, and you can still email me about it, but I decided it doesn't belong here.

I write best and most prolifically when I am emotional about something. For the last little while, I have been relatively comfortable with my P, and other things have been bothering me instead. I wrote about those things in response, but I feel it was a mistake to conflate those with the original purpose of this blog. There is some deeply personal material here that I want people to read and think about. Every entry like the last two puts space between that material and a new reader to my blog and disrupts the narrative of my P experience. A lot of new readers came through yesterday and only one read through to here. It already made me uncomfortable to get such a huge response to something snarky and muckraking when that's not what my blog is about at all.  I have certainly been accused of negativity, but this is no place for cynicism.

Then I got an email last night from the other "P" congratulating me on an upcoming writing project that grew out of this blog. I thought about what she said to me when I told her my diagnosis. I thought about the voice she drew out of me. I thought about all the emails I've gotten from people who also have P. I thought about the young postdoc who confessed to me that ze was terrified to tell hir PI that ze has similar condition.  Then I thought, there are a lot of blogs about the downside of glam, but there aren't that many blogs for that postdoc. That's what the other P knew from the start and that's what I needed to be reminded of.

"S", if you're still listening I'm sorry. Anyone else who doesn't understand, please read the whole blog  before you judge.