Privacy

Some of you might have noticed that I wasn’t here yesterday.

It was always my plan to write the blog on a daily basis, so I did just stop in and leave a note, but that was all. It doesn’t really qualify, and it certainly wasn’t the minimum 300 words that I’d set myself.

It turns out, though, that there was a reason for this that I think was totally good and valid, although some might take issue with it. 

The reason I didn’t write a blog yesterday was to do with privacy. Of course, if I’d been on the ball and I’d had a blog in the drawer, which I probably should have, I wouldn’t have found myself in the position that I did, but... you know... hindsight and all that...

        

Yesterday, I did not write a blog, because I did not feel able to write about the things that were occupying my mind, and I couldn’t free my mind from the things that were occupying it for long enough to write a substantive blog about something else.

Not very long ago I declared that I was going to branch out, that I was going to write about ‘other stuff’ just as I had been writing about writing, but it turns out that there really is stuff that is simply too private to want to air in public.

It all began with the Mercy Dash blog.

We adored our cat, and he died. I was terribly upset by his death, and I wrote about it in my blog the morning after it happened.

I don’t regret writing that blog, and I was genuinely touched by the warmth of everyone’s response to our loss. It was, nevertheless, odd to be commiserated with over something so personal. Kind, wonderful people that I have never met said lovely things that I was genuinely charmed by, but I couldn’t help feeling strange about them sharing my grief.

Some would say that’s what the internet is for, and that’s what a blog is for, and I think there’s some truth in that. I also think that I would share this sort of story again. My grief was real and profound, but it had a universal quality. Anyone who has owned and loved a pet knows how it feels to lose one.

I don’t know whether it is something to do with the ‘creative temperament’, but I am pretty sure that I was born this way. I feel things. It has always been important to me that I feel things. On the other hand, I’ve never been all that much good at sharing that stuff, at least not with anyone beyond the two or three people that I am closest to.

I’m not the sort of woman that is surrounded by a bevy of girlfriends, and I never have been. I’m not the sort of woman who meets other women to shop or for coffee mornings or lunches. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t suit me.

I do feel something when I share the things I share in my blog, and I do sometimes wonder where my thoughts and ideas land and how I alter my readers’ thoughts and feelings about things. I do feel responsible.

In the end, though, I must be responsible to myself too. 

So, yesterday, it seemed fairer to everyone not to write a blog. It seemed fairer to me not to write about the things that were absorbing my heart and mind, and it seemed fairer to you not to shortchange you by writing something that came from neither fount.