I actually love this place. I am just not happy here right now.
I have written in it for over 10 years.
It chronicled my pregnancy and the birth of Squink. It watched the early years of his growth and my trying to figure out how to move it out of being a mommy blog into something more.
There was the year I tried to love poetry, still don't.
There was a feeble attempt at food blogging.
At the forefront, though, has always been something that I would call my story.
The funny thing is that it took my cancer diagnoses to change that.
At one point this blog became about other people.
It took a triple lecture from my mother in text, email and phone call form to change the way I look at this place.
The lecture was about how I had offended my aunt because I hadn't thanked her enough in these pages.
I was told that it had been explained and that she understood, but three messages/lectures about one incident about how I had failed here are hard for me to recover from, at least at this point, Especially since I know they still read this.
I try to write something but each time I ask myself who is going to get offended this time. I can't do it, I have 68 drafts sitting in my folder waiting to be published or worked on. This place was not about making other people happy, it was supposed to be a place to write. Making other people happy is not what I wanted this place to be about. I can't do it that way. Since I can't seem to get past that and the sense that somehow what I write is or can be rude or offensive or even (at best) insensitive...
Oh, I was just trying to work out my gratitude for how many people helped me... nothing more... The thing is..., I am not mad... I feel like I am just not good enough to do this anymore.
This situation (above) happened right on the tail of a post in which I chose not to include my husband, mainly to protect him and to make it about my son and I (yes, that was selfish)... he was hurt and having to manage his hurt feelings was hard, but I deserved it. In the case of my husband, I was wrong... I should have asked if I could include him and didn't... . but in the other I was not.
This was supposed to be my journal, my thoughts, my stories, my ideas... and now they are terrified of hurting someone else's feelings, having to deal with more emotional upheaval, being at the end to more lectures holding my behavior to a certain standard, more hurt feelings (my own included).
But what can I do?
I hated the year I only wrote about poems, it was so anonymous and sterile. but it seems that is the only thing I can try to do anymore. I love my family too much to risk it.
I met some really wonderful people through this blog.
I miss that part of this...
However, in the interest that no one gets hurt by reading this blog, I am keeping this proverbial mouth (blog) shut. At least for now.
“You should try not to talk so much, friend. You'll sound far less stupid that way. ~ Breeze”
~ Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire
I love your blog! And that we were able to connect through it. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm going to invoke the wisdom of Miss Taylor Swift here: "Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. . . .shake it off, shake it off."
ReplyDeleteThe blog is for you, and it's for your thoughts. It's a blog, it's not Crane's engraved stationery. It's "pull" communication, where we can all choose to read the witty, beautiful, charming, wise (almost as wise as Taylor Swift!) things you have to say, it's not push communication where you're shoving it in anyone's face and forcing people to read it. Anyone who doesn't like it has the freedom to shake, shake, shake it off, too.
But you do you, Blair, and don't hide your light under a bushel unless YOU want to.