Although this is a journal about my semi-personal life as a private citizen, it is also a public one. I write it in hopes that someone is interested enough to read it. Thinking that my life is on display is a sort of bizarre motivator. It keeps me going like the Energizer bunny. It gives me some false sense of family and community. False because it’s more or less one sided and it’s generally less information than I’d tell a friend over a drink. I feel like it can have this great confessional quality to it, but I gotta know it’s not real. This is ok by me, I just need to call a spade a spade.
It’s kinda tough when I’m feeling blue. I feel like it’s not so great to share with the world when I’m feeling sad. Not that it has stopped me from writing about it so far, but I do worry about loosing readers. And then I suddenly realize that I really don’t have this great confessional format, I just have a shallow representation of my life presented as some sort of product (up and to the right!). I suppose that would be ok if I were a newscaster and I was really good at being happy on the worst of days. But I’m not. I’m tempermental and fussy and cranky and frustrated. I don’t think these qualities are very entertaining. I certainly don’t find them entertaining. So what to do? Do I learn how to put on a happy face or do I just keep writing how I write and wish for calmer waters? In the end, I’ll be the one looking back reading through all this stuff, so I better learn to be as honest as I can, without giving up something personal and precious to me. I think that’s called compromise.