So, I miss my blog's original header photo like NOBODY'S BUSINESS, but I have spent countless hours searching the interwebs for it, for a few years now actually. To no avail. That dude packed up his website, blogger templates and photos, and hit the road. Totally off the grid. Not even cached sites will get me a good copy of it to use.
Even people who used his stuff have blank headers like I did - theirs disappeared too. Sadness. That photo perfectly depicted me and my inner life. But alas.
I found this one. It will do for now.
MOVING ON. (Lord knows I have expended enought energy and headspace trying to find that f*ing photo of that girl in headphones, good lord. Any readers who have been with me since the beginning and fall across that image in this lifetime, do let me know)
I have a bazillion posts in Draft mode from a decade ago through to just a year and a half ago. A DECADE Y'ALL.
I look at them upon occasion and think dammitall, why didn't we just hit Publish while the getting was good instead of thinking they had to be 'just right' first?
I think frequently about blogging when I have stuff to sort through - which is ALWAYS, but in recent months it's moreso.
I have a huge craving to write when I need to make sense of my world turned upside down (see: this entire blog in 2006-7)
Lately I realized that my long conversations with friends on the phone via texting and Kik is where all my extensive thinking, writing, and navel-gazing has taken place in the last year or more.
So.
Every time I considered blogging all this business, which was often, I thought well shit, I've already typed all this out once ffs, I don't wanna reinvent the wheel.
And then it hit me (thwack!) - since I have invested hours upon f*ing HOURS in text conversations, why not just screenshot them, crop out the identifying stuff, and post those?
It may or may not work, but imma give it a shot. What the hell. I'm a pro at both spectacular failures and fantastic success at times. We'll just see what happens.
CAVEAT - and hear me on this - I'm going to post by date as much as possible and it may be all wibbly wobbly timey wimey out of order while I build the story. So it may not make sense for a hot minute. But if I keep them all in eternal Draft Mode, we'll be at 2028 with me again saying oh look at all these posts saved as drafts I shoulda published. And I don't want that to be us y'all. Not again.
Get ready. There's a lot going on.
So. Let's try it.
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Oh and PS:
Hello, People who know me in real life and still creep my blog. Yes I see you.
The Interwebs are this cool technology that show me your stalkery ways.
Now here's the deal - I know you. You know me. I'm still gonna be honest about my life's Awesome as well as its Angst. I made that announcement over 10 years ago on this blog - I'm completely Honest on this site or we're done here. Which is why it was anonymous in the first place.
So, Honest it is. And there's a lot going on. I have lived on all sides of all fences. You still wanna dance with joy over my sorrows, that's your business. Keep on judging me iff'n you'd like to, there's quite a lot on the menu for you in that area. Bon appetit.
.
I do not want to walk this road again. Tried so hard not to. Over and over, I tried to rationalize the irrational. Because the good was worth it. Until it broke down in the road, undeniably and sudden.
In the end, the universe took my hand and pulled me, hard and fast, out of the room.
I didn't have a choice.
And it breaks my heart in seventeen places.
Rinse and repeat.
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You know there will be days When you're tired That you can't take another step The night will have no stars And you'll think you've gone as far As you will ever get I can't really say why everybody wishes they were somewhere else But in the end, the only steps that matter Are the ones you take all by yourself Walk on, walk on, walk on You can't go back now
When I first started blogging here in 2006 (!), I was publishing a post almost once a day. Sometimes twice. It was such a help (crutch?) in the crisis cesspool where I found myself flailing about in my first marriage. Still funny to say that: first marriage. When I got married to The Husband (now Wasband), I remember being pretty. darn. sure. that I had skipped the 'starter marriage' since I was in my late 20's before I wed. Silly me.
Anyway, the frequency of posts here was crazy - I had several of them in Draft mode at any given time, ready to publish. I was a writing, posting, navel-gazing machine. I needed to be. I had lived in a Stepford machine for years by then. Suburban driving, khaki-and-twinset-wearing, toddler-wrangling, freezer-meal-cooking, ignore-all-internal-hopes-and-dreams machine. I didn't even listen to music during those years, unless it was the theme song to Kipper or Blue's Clues, or any kid show on Noggin, Disney, PBS Kids, or Nick Jr from 1999-2005. Seriously. And I loved music.
I look back now in amazement and wonder how that happened. And I really don't know. I was in a fog. Now, the part of the fog where I played and danced and made stuff with my kids - that part was wonderful and I miss it dearly now that they are in high school. The part where I was at home with them 24/7 I now treasure. As if the universe knew I was about to get very very screwed, and gave me that one gift in the shitstorm that has been my entire life. Of course, I didn't appreciate as much as I should have while it was happening - who ever does? We always discover how truly magical something was as we turn our head to look back at it.
Then the posting here became less frequent after a year or two, then the separation and divorce 2009-10. And that whole kettle of crazy years happened, until we trickled down to - oh hello, it's been 16 months since I posted? really? I do think about this blog a lot. But the brain synapses moving from thinking to logging-in: rare.
A few days ago my daughter asked me: if I could, would I go back and not do a fairly recent certain thing? I said "oh honey, if I could go back in time and change stuff it would be waaaaaaaay before this decade. I would go all the way back to college and do a lot of things so differently that your question wouldn't even be relevant." And that's true. Although it didn't directly answer her question, because frankly I didn't have a good answer for it. The majority of my life decisions have been so poorly executed, the default answer should probably always be: yes, I would change it. no, I wouldn't have done it.
There are Golden People, who go through life on gossamer wings, making perfect decisions and having the universe line up in formation around their life. I gawk at these people, and covet their Midas touch on the world as they pass through it. I am not, nor have I ever been, one of them. I think I'm pretty damn amazing in the middle of this septic tank the universe has surrounded me with, but sometimes I mourn. If I had grown up in a safe environment, without trust issues, or douchecanoe people along the way ... how great could I have been - could my life had been - if I had walked through it fearless and confident. Pretty damn great I think.
Yes, of course it could be worse, and I count the blessings I do have daily, blah blah. But this is my blog, please don't require starving-children-perspective of me in this safe place where I come to navel-gaze.
