Thursday, September 19, 2013

Happy Accidents (or, How I Came to Know I'm Not Crazy Through Blogging)

Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
it's just catastrophe.
                                                  ― Anne Carson

Six months ago, I began to blog.

Oh crap, I know you're thinking.  Here we go with some other load of self-important mumbo jumbo.  Why can't this chick ever just post funny cat pictures?  Why do we always have to go inside her freakin' HEAD? 

The answer?  You have to go inside my head because IT'S MY FREAKIN' BLOG. 

My blogging was born out of this fervent need to get a bunch of hogwash out of my head.  I walk around much of the time with my brain so full of...well...ME....that I sometimes can't make heads or tails out of anything.  For most of my life, I've just let the stuff sit there, like hair clogging up a drain.  There was no real "flow" in my life because everything kept getting stuck on this massive glob of JUNK I had in my head.  I have spent a huge portion of life just trying to get around myself.  (And I do realize that this is all gobbledygook...but I'm a ridiculous mess of a person who's trying to make sense out of the chaos.  Bear with me for a moment.)  

One day, I sat down to write.  And, instead of jotting down the twaddle in a personal journal or starting yet ANOTHER angst-ridden or self-ridiculing short story, I decided to share.

And share I did.

I have spewed in the last six months more ridiculous crap than I thought possible.  The words just kept coming.  And coming.  They spilled out of me like water.  All of it has been free-form.  Almost none has been edited (other than by some very kind friends who know how much I abhor misspellings and poor grammar choices).  All of it has come from whatever odd place in my head I am in on any given day. Trust me when I say that there are many, many odd places in my head.

And, lo and behold, transformation has occurred.

Writing a blog is a lot like skydiving...sometimes, you just have to let go and jump.  And, yes, this IS me.  On the bottom.
Because I let go of fear and I let go of judgment (against myself and my words), I have become free.  I realize (sometimes in an extreme fit of chagrin) that I tend to go WAY overboard on the sharing.  (I cringe to think how much passing acquaintances now know about me...but I will tell you HONESTLY that I never quite expected very many people to READ this blog.)  But, man, I will tell you this:  the truth will set you free. I know the terminology is overused and has lost its meaning.  But I have grown tremendously because I've done something I never imagined I could do:  I have taken my skeletons...my secrets...my shame...and I've shed LIGHT on them.  Darkness cannot thrive in light.  And that, my friends, is freedom.  Cleaning out the cobwebby ickiness of life through telling the truth is transforming. 

I've done some tough work on myself over the last 20 years.  I've faced some terrible demons.  But I don't think anything has freed me the way this very public revealing has.  It has caused some problems in relationships...problems that I'm still figuring out and trying to avoid.  This is a fledgling effort and eventually I hope to find my voice and maybe stop making people mad (but I kinda doubt it). 

So...thank you.   Thanks for reading and for not being TOO terribly hard on this self-absorbed nerd.  Thanks to all of you who have written to me saying that you recognize a little bit of yourselves in what I write.  Thanks for being patient when the great majority of what I write is absolute garbage.  Thanks for laughing when it's funny and for politely looking away when it's just embarrassing.  

Thank you for viewing my 123 posts (so far...and counting!) many, many thousands of times over.  Thank you to the people who read this blog regularly in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Ukraine, Poland, France, Japan and Malaysia.

Most of all, thank you for helping to set me free.

I can't promise it's going to get any better as far as reading material goes.  But, here are the top six blog posts of the last six months.  I look forward to the next six months!  (I try not to make any commitments longer than THAT...I'm terribly fickle.)

My Ex-Husband Is So Lucky to Have Me

Waxing Nostalgic:  Why I Think Reunions are Fun

Who Am I?

Worst Parenting Fail EVER: The Target Story

You Just Can't Take Me Anywhere

Forgiving on Father's Day



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1 comment:

  1. Amen! Love it, love your honesty, even love your skeletons! :)

    ReplyDelete