Reading Trolly’s manifesto http://bloggerel.blog.co.uk/2006/09/20/blogging_a_personal_manifesto~1143967

 and also catching up with other people’s blogs after an interval of a week or so, set me off thinking about why my relationship with blogland is so intermittent.

I started this as a way of getting back at my husband when I was angry and confused and in a lot of (psychical) pain.  Prior to that, of course, I have written forever, and written a daily journal pretty much consistently for about the last 5-10 years (and intermittently before that), but not one I have ever felt inclined to share with anyone else.  So, I stuck all this pain and confusion in this weird, semi-public space, and discovered that people were replying to what I’d said – which I really hadn’t anticipated.  In some ways this was quite exciting, but in others a bit disturbing.  Some of those original blog friends of mine have since sunk below the horizon, but new ones pop up every now and again.

Sometimes the responses are helpful and enjoyable, and encourage me to find out more about the senders, and try to establish a ‘relationship’ of some kind with them.  Others, even from people I’ve previously considered ‘friends’, have been less than helpful, have struck a nerve and driven me deeper inside myself.  On the whole then, pretty much like ‘real’ friendships, but speeded up and more intense.

Sometimes blogland can seem very cosy and a bit cliquey and makes me feel that I’m standing on the fringes of this group of people who all know each other and are constantly sharing in jokes that I don’t understand, so that I feel very much on the outside looking in.  This, too, reflects the way I often feel in social situations.  Mostly I am still the kid who no one ever wants to play with - in the immortal words of Janis Ian: ‘Those whose names are never called/When choosing sides for basketball’.

(Just read back that para and realised that I had used the phrase ‘on the fringes’ three times, so had to do a bit of editing there!)

Sometimes people do seem to want me to play, and for a while I feel like I am one of the ‘cool kids’, but then I worry that I will be found out, there are days when I just don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to respond to those other people, that they will think I am thoughtless and shallow if I don’t say SOMETHING, but that all I can think of to say is thoughtless and shallow anyway, or I just even don’t bother checking what other people have been saying, because real life is complicated enough and I just don’t have time for this.  And I think, maybe I am just too selfish and self-centred and not really considerate enough of other people’s feelings, so I don’t really deserve to be part of ‘the gang’, and then, as Lady Lucy would say, the whole ‘guilt trip’ kicks in.

As I said, I write constantly, I always start the day with writing 500 words in my journal (that’s a hand-written page in my A4 diary, which has very narrow lines, or 2 A4 pages in the old ringbound ‘Pukka pads’ I used to use, or 4 pages of the A5 ringbound notebook I take on holiday, or 1 page in Word, single spaced, 12 point Times New Roman).  Since I’ve been on this sleep regime where I get up at 5:30, writing in my diary is the first thing I do, so I had already written 500 words before I actually came on line this morning and started this particular rant.  Then I have been trying to start my working day – assuming I don’t have to go out anywhere -by writing (on the computer this time) 500 words of my novel – at one time, I used to be able to do this quite easily, and built up quite a lot of text over a time, though other things took over my life, and now I’ve tried to restart and am finding it much harder.

For a while, I tried putting my daily journal onto this blog – but I gave up on this for two reasons: first, because actually sitting and typing it all in was just taking up too much time, for a while I was running on a backlog and typing up a whole week’s worth of entries on Sunday, but it just got ridiculous, and I had too much else to do.  The main reason though, is that those entries are SO personal and introspective, and so filled with my deep feelings about myself (self loathing, guilt, despair etc etc) that I found the responses I was getting back were just exacerbating those feelings.  I felt trapped inside a hall of mirrors of my own misery; of people telling me I wasn’t entitled to be miserable, which made me feel guilty for being miserable, and then of being told that I wasn’t entitled to feel guilty either, which made me feel guiltier still for feeling guilty…

So, here I am.  Why am I doing this?  God knows I have enough other things to do.