11.25.2015

home.

I closed this blog a few weeks ago. Firmly and with great resolve. Something bad happened to me while I was blogging here - a lot of really great things happened, but the other thing was so big and fucked up...it just felt like I needed to start over. This place felt tainted. It felt sad. 

So. I re-opened another blog, HERE. But I'll be honest: that blog feels foreign and unnatural. That blog has cooler features - like I can do those Twitter card thingies on Wordpress; and I can write something up, hit publish, and everything just automatically...goes. Goes to Facebook, goes to Twitter, goes to Google+ (who the hell ever uses that place??), goes wherever I've checked a little box telling it to publish to. LOOKS awesome. Very fancy pants; could never figure out how to do it here because I just don't have the HTML skills. 

And yet. That new blog just doesn't FEEL like "home." 

And I really need to be somewhere right now that feels like "home." So much as happened over just the last month, I really really really need to be somewhere that feels like home. 

When I started this blog two years ago, I was in my old house, where it felt like home. And so when I come here, it feels comfortable and familiar and I feel like I'm home. I need to be somewhere where I can write, not caring about who the hell is reading what I type because when I started this blog, I really didn't care who the hell read what I typed. I was typing down the bones, for me. I was here for ME. It was never about other people, and somewhere along the way, it changed. It became about other people and who was reading or may read what I typed. And so maybe that's why the other place doesn't feel quite right. I set it up because I was going to use it to write for other people, and not me. I set it up because I was being defiant, and forging on. Or wherever my psychology was at when it told me: Let's start fresh! Let's start fresh and shiny! But that didn't feel like home. Because I am not fresh, and I am certainly not shiny.

I would like to write about what happened to me in great depth, because I have lingering ick about it, but I have a feeling that's a bad idea I need to save for a really rainy day years down the road. I think the person has finally gotten the message and (hopefully) has moved on or is currently moving on. I don't bear ill will toward that person; I hope they find their happiness and someone more suitable to draw their energy from. Taught me a lot about what I don't want in a friend, as I'm sure it taught them. Still. It was an experience that has altered me drastically - I am still trying to decide if the altering is a good or a bad thing. I feel like I'm sort of forcing a lot of what I do online now and that wasn't the case even a month ago. A month ago, if I felt a feel, I wrote about it. Sometimes I was completely wrong about my feel, and then I felt really dumb. But other times, my feels were right on target and that's always good. Which is the whole point of this place - to live my life out loud, and whoever wants to grab some popcorn and be entertained, great, or maybe someone will see something and recognize it and feel less alone. Now I measure what I say out loud, and that's never been who I am, really. I'm someone who strives to be authentic; what you see is what you get. So other than carefully being careful not to say or write anything that would get me fired? I said whatever was in my brain, I wrote about things that mattered to, or bothered, or angered, or helped, or elated ME. And now I don't know how well I'll be able to do that, but it's important to me to keep trying. However, I now think about things like audience - what person may be reading what I'm writing, and what intentions might they have? I'm only saying this out loud because if I ever come across weird or paranoid or bizarrely skittish, that's why.

And that's something that has drastically altered me in my online interactions but also offline to a certain extent...and I am still sorting out how I want to feel about that.

At any rate. I am not the same person who was writing here a year ago, or even two months ago. I am skittish. And weird and paranoid. I can be overly dramatic in ways that are extremely unattractive...I really feel like, up until about a month or two ago, this trait was fairly cute and one of my more endearingly quirky qualities. But now I think it's a little darker, maybe? On Facebook recently, I unfriended two people, two really nice and perfectly lovely people, over a couple of things of a political nature - one person I disagreed with, and one I agreed with but who disagreed with my mom in kind of a rude way. I mean, yeah, what you said was true but that's my MOM. Only *I* get to be rude to my mom. I think that, now, after the stalking (and it WAS a stalking), I just feel like: hmmm, how well do I really know you? If I don't know you all that well, and this internet area is for people I actually know, then...bye. But they were perfectly safe and fine and I completely over-reacted. I did the same thing on Twitter - if you freaked me out in ANY way, shape, or form at the height of that shit fest? Blocked. And I feel really bad, because I know for a fact I really hurt one of the people's feelings. (This would be the online version of what the military calls civilian casualties during shock and awe.)

This totally bites, you guys. And I've certainly altered how I look at social media and who I interact with on it and how; I no longer see it as silly and ridiculous and a place to meet a lot of potentially nice friends. I mean, I do...but I also see the slippery and diabolically seductive darkness to it, and I now completely understand - and believe me I write this with the deepest and utmost sincerity - why notable people, be they actors or singers or authors or whatever, refuse to acknowledge every individual's attempt to get them to interact with them. People are scary AF. I have met some really lovely, awesome people on it. I have made some friends I'd invite into my home without a second's thought. But going forward, that novel's probably finished. Because people can be scary AF. The end.

So I'm going to re-open this blog, simply because that other place didn't feel right and I need to feel that I'm somewhere that's home. I need to be able to type and spew and vent my spleen somewhere that's simple and mine. I'll forego fancy pants for awhile, because fancy pants feels forced and unnatural. I may change my mind (are you getting that this mind changing thing is a big problem for me?) a few months down the road, but this is where I'm at for now. I'm at a place in life I need people to be consistent with me, because I need to be consistent with me...and changing a whole bunch of things feels wobbly and unstable and inconsistent. This place feels homey and consistent, and so I'm going to park my ass right here and write. It's where I've thought out my thoughts best, for over 2 years. This place holds MY thoughts, MY stories, MY history, however screwy and tainted and misguided and totally off course and weird that may be. I like it here, and so I'm coming home. 

Scary people can come hang out and read however much they like - enjoy it, drink it all in, get your daily or weekly or monthly dose of whatever fucked up energy you feel is necessary to continue your process. If I'm somewhere I feel safe, then. Scary people aren't real. I'm also at a point where I quite frankly don't give a single flying fuck what other people think or how other people feel about anything I do be it online or offline; I question and hyper-criticize my own self enough every day, thanks. Be assured whatever negative, judge-y thought you may have about me I've already had myself, and about ten times before you thought it. Or maybe you're not judge-y and negative at all. We're all just living a life, right? Making choices that take us left or throw us right or send us deep into the murky wells of our deepest lows or lift us up to our highest highs. I've chronicled all of mine here, and decided I'm going to keep doing that until I no longer feel like it. Most blogs last about 5 years, I've read...I bet I've got about 3 more years of oversharing my emotional wranglings out loud here. 

Hoping that, 3 more years from now, I'll be back to the more open, carefree kind of girl I was...and I'll be somewhere that really feels like home. (And there, in that last bit, I am not talking about online anything.)


This pretty much sums up what I need right now.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.