Thursday, January 08, 2009

"New Year? Time to clean out the old emotional closet?"

On Tuesday I wrote a very personal blog entry that in some ways was a confession. It poured out of me inexplicably after I read something online that touched deep into the recesses of my psyche, connecting with some unprocessed pain. Short of posting the blog entry, I instead sent it to Ms. K to get her reaction. The subject was nothing new to her and she acknowledged that what I wrote was deeply deeply personal.

"Are you sure you want to post it?" she asked.

At the time I was almost certain I would. As the day went on, however, I decided to hold onto it for the time being. I wanted to think on it and gain some perspective over my raw emotion. But the story was still inside of me begging to be released and so I found myself spilling my soul out into a 1,200 word stream of conscious explanation of something devastating that happened to me two years ago -- the very event that I vaguely talked about in my withheld blog entry. The words came out of me like a dam breaking forth and the shear act of doing so left me emotionally exhausted. I wrote until the story was no more, transferred from amorphous emotion into black digital type.

I'm not sure what to do with what I wrote. Currently it resides as a saved draft in my email and the original blog post I mentioned is also in limbo. Perhaps I will post later . . . or perhaps the purpose of writing what I did was not to share, but to have it out there so to speak. We will see. No offense to my dear friends reading, but these are the times I wish this blog was truly anonymous.

5 comments:

Natazzz said...

Even though I include a lot of my personal life in my blog, there are things I will never blog about.

That does not mean it does not get written down. There is something freeing in putting it into words. Sometimes that is enough.

Make sure you hold on to that draft. I still regret every page I ever ripped out of my diary when I was younger.

Anonymous said...

Agreed! Don't delete it. Maybe copy and paste it into a Word doc or something on your hard drive so it won't accidentally get deleted, or worse, published. I don't trust myself with save drafts in my Blogger account. I transfer them to a place a bit more secure.

I was looking through some files of mine recently and I came across a letter I wrote to myself on my 33rd birthday. I've been pretty open on my blog but it wasn't something I could post because of certain people reading my site. But I had to write it and get it out there in some way. As I reread it this past week, it was a testament to how far I've come. It was so reassuring and awesome. So, even if it forever lives in my My Documents folder, that's enough. Just writing it and allowing myself to refer back to it a few years later helped me big time.

Anonymous said...

hiya - so i'm one of those people who stumbled across your blog at some point and just kept reading. :) as part of the whole "new year, new you" thing, i figured i'd stop being such a passive reader and introduce myself. so, hi. :)

also, in regards to this post in particular - i think it's easy to forget sometimes, particularly in the age of blogging where it's almost second nature to share everything, that writing for yourself is totally fine too. i've had several blog incarnations and have run into this problem before: what do i do with the things i write but can't, for one reason or another, post? i finally solved the problem by keeping a written journal that's separate from my blog, which i use to sort through the stuff i can't imagine letting other people read. in any case, though, i definitely echo the other comments - save it!!! you never know when you might want to look back to see how far you've come.

Anonymous said...

I find that writing about something painful helps somehow release it. Once it's on paper or in a document form it seems easier to deal with to me. I've written things several times that I ended up not posting. Feel no pressure to post - sometimes it's just good to write it and not do anything with it.

Anonymous said...

I find that writing about something painful helps somehow release it. Once it's on paper or in a document form it seems easier to deal with to me. I've written things several times that I ended up not posting. Feel no pressure to post - sometimes it's just good to write it and not do anything with it.