Moving on

I think I am done with the most recent drama in my life, although I may stew over it a bit now and again. But it did prove for some interesting discussions with D, my mom and myself.

My mom told me I just shouldn't read the emails people send me anymore, a point that launched one of our better bickers. My response to her was questioning why I should lose my right to read my email because sometimes people send me crap or nonsense or too many cutesy little Precious Moment blurbs (like my mother). It is like answering my front door---when it rings, I answer. Sometimes it is a Jehovah's Witness, whom I send away as politely as possible, and sometimes it is a Girl Scout selling those addictive cookies, whom I send away with one of D's paychecks and her promise that she will return in 3 weeks with the goods.

I did think alot about blogging and why I blog. Initially, I started it on a lark, but now it has multiple purposes, one of which is to vent and reflect, and there is an important aspect of it being public. If it is public, if someone other than myself can read it, I am forced to really think things through....to ask myself hard questions. If I just wrote in my own personal journal, I could do junk like this.....

OMG! So-and-so is a big tooty-head, and I think they've been at the bong too long (hey, that rhymes). And I hate this and that and him and her and why, oh, why do things never go my way? Well, *&)($%**())(#%, I am never gonna do this, that and the other.

Which might feel really good but doesn't actually do me any good because it is really just a rant without me putting one iota of thought into what I'm feeling and why and looking at my motivations and other people's motivations. I have boxes full of journals in which I did just vent...and now, looking back on it, having a couple years of therapy under my belt, I can see my issues, my negative thinking, my irrational thought-patterns, and none of it proved to be helpful.

And in the 2 instances in which I've pissed people off (in part because of my blog), both of them didn't usually read my blog but read it after an "issue" with me and thought I might have written something. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think this may be called something on the order of "looking for trouble." But I can understand that people would feel angered that I had blogged about a situation I'd had with them (even if no one else but the 2 of us knows who the "other person" is about whom I write).

I'm sure I would feel angry too. I like to think, though, that after my anger, I would really try to see if the blogger had a valid point. Sometimes the things we get angry with are the things we know are true (or have some validity). A part of me wants to say, "I haven't done anything inviolate by blogging, and I can't understand why people get their panties in a twist when I write about situations that involve them." But this is the defensive part of me...the part of me that wants to be right all the time. I know that blogging about an "issue" takes a tough skin to write and read... and even though I don't intend to hurt feelings, I know I have. And I do feel badly about that.

But not enough to stop blogging. If the email that started all this mess was a testament to anything, it is that I have the right to write what I want. Because someone wrote that email, and I know even at my most aggravated, nothing I have written has been as inflammatory as that.