Distress Signals

April 17th, 2009

This morning during a rushed phone conversation with a friend who, though she lives only a couple of miles away, I keep in touch with more electronically than in person, we both noted that we realized the other had been having a rough time recently, we need to get together and talk.

This sort of thing is always a little uncomfortable, of course. I race back through my Twitter stream making sure there is nothing indiscreet, and I suppose it’s much more about the blog. And I start thinking about caveats: I don’t blog when I am off having a terrific time do other things (because I am off having a terrific time doing other things!) and being able to blog when I am feeling frustrated/lonely/overwhelmed does help. I try very hard not to violate the privacy of anyone around me, and worry about anything reflecting on Raven.

I have no real idea who reads this except for regular commenters, most of whom I talk to or communicate with outside of the blog so they know that after a rough patch things do get better and easier. But then I see somebody I haven’t seen in months and get a sympathetic “everything okay?” and have the strangest feelings. It’s not that there’s any one thing I’ve written about that I regret, but I worry about a cumulative effect. I suppose this is why blogs get password-protected: you worry less about being misconstrued. At the same time, I worry about living in a world where people don’t talk openly or honestly about the things that are hard for them, because there is nothing as horribly disempowering as feeling like not only do you have problems, but you are the only person in the world with these problems. And what I love most about blogging tends to be the conversation, the insight, the sharing, the not being alone with the hard stuff.

Still, I feel like I ought to make it known, somehow, things are good here. Not easy, but good.