Ain’t no cure

One hundred and eighty five days is a long time to not do something you profess to love. It has been one hundred and eighty five days since I wrote a blog post. This blog which sustained me during dark times, good times, mothering times, and busy times, has been shelved. It was intentional, in a way.

My last post The Cat’s Out of the Bag caused quite the ruckus and it lead me to a long period of reflection on why I write. This reflection also caused to examine the link between writing what you know and writing about who you know.

While I was writing my PhD I was acutely aware that I was writing about the work of someone who was alive and well. It is simply easier, on one level, to write about dead philosophers, the longer dead the better sometimes. There was a very real possibility that my work would be read by the subject of my thesis. In fact when I met her, it was almost too much. Sometimes finding out that a specific and particular person has read a post is the same feeling.

This blog has its readers. I know you are out there somewhere, but for me it worked better when I thought no one read it. Knowledge of my readers gave me anxieties about how real events and people would be interpreted. This manifest itself largely in censoring. A long long list of drafts, another similarly long list of banned subjects, topics and events to write about.

I vacillated between no one reads it, so it doesn’t matter and everyone reads it, so it is matters a lot. Between these two points is where I need to be. The tension to be resolved rests with the delight of writing and receiving responses and the uncomfortable knowledge of those readers.

This morning, I was reminded of my blog again. By a reader. ‘Isn’t it on Stella Orbit’s blog?’ came a beam of light from behind the clouds. I have written about a great many things of this blog and some of it was great! Some of it was banal and boring and probably shouldn’t have been written. That’s blogging.

I stopped writing because of readers. And I wanted to start again for the same reason. This is the second of my false starts. This draft has sat for 40 days. Waiting. For what I am not sure. Whatever it is, cheerfulness keep breaking through.