I don’t understand why I feel so sad this morning. Where are these tears coming from? I should be happy, I have lots to look forward to – Paris next week. Maybe it’s apprehension, the thought that things won’t be as good as I anticipate, that I’ll be disappointed. Maybe it’s tiredness, maybe it’s stress. All the usual suspects. Maybe it’s loneliness.
Going to Cambridge today, I’m taking my neighbour and we’re going to do some shopping, meet up with some other friends for lunch, go to a talk in the afternoon. I prefer going on my own, but I’m sure it’ll be fine, and I’ll enjoy it, though sometimes she irritates me. I will have to strive to be tolerant.
I had a lonely, introspective evening and a bad night. I guess I probably had about four and a half hours’ sleep. And I have to drive. I’ll just have to concentrate. It’ll be OK.
I started thinking about blogging again last night, wondering why I bother when so few people ever read it. In a way, it seems worse when someone comments, because it reminds me that this isn’t just a private journal, that the possibility for people to read it and respond is there, they just choose not to. I always say I do this for myself, not for anyone else, I don’t expect or want any reaction. I look at the cosy, chatty world that exists inside this space, and think, here I am on the outside looking in, the way it has always been, right from earliest childhood memories.
I know this isn’t necessarily true, that I can feel sometimes that I belong, that there are people who like me and do want my company, even if I don’t understand why. And I know that if I spend time with other people, I will enjoy it and feel better for it. I can be sociable.
But most of my life, like my blogs, feels like a conversation with myself, an enclosed, sealed little world. It sounds melodramatic when I put it like that, hermit-like, disturbed, psychopathic even. It’s just that these great waves of separation come over me, of separateness, and half of me desperately wants to find some kind of connection and half of me wants to stay detached and is rather arrogant about my detachment.
It’s all part of the same thing, I think, how can I explain without sounding even more arrogant, it’s to do with being a thinker, dare I say it, an intellectual, someone who is an observer rather than a participator, who sees the world and wants to express it. I need to think and create, and I want always to learn, to find out more, to add to my ideas so I can develop them further. Well, maybe everyone feels like that, maybe I really am being arrogant to think that that makes me special . And this is all bound up with being a rather ordinary middle aged, middle class woman, mother of two, living in a nice house in a nice, twee English village, and trying to muck in and do her bit and stay on good terms with her neighbours.