Getting to know me?

Just Waiting for the Wind (Autumn, 2011)

By chance, I recently met someone who reads this blog. She didn't know it was "my" blog until we met and she recognized me from my picture. It's like a tiny, little taste of fame. This reader observed that I am not like my blog. She said I seem happy and together, but my blog is "heavy." She wasn't complaining, exactly, but noting something I've noted myself - I tend to write here more often when I'm angsty or freaking out than when I'm not.

Which is to say, I only post a couple of times a month, often when I'm most angsty or I'm freaking out.

But reading my blog, not understanding the big spaces of happy, excited and boring between what I write, could lead to some interesting impressions of me as a person. I'd never thought much about it, because I didn't really think anyone was GETTING TO KNOW ME through all this sharing. When I write, it's to explore a theme, to work ideas loose - it's like noodling on a guitar. It's not meant to be an expression of my whole being. I'd never thought of people meeting me and expecting me to be "like" my blog, at all. It kind of freaked me out.

For me, the blog is a space of creative expression, not a journal. The themes I explore are just themes, bits I'm working through in a moment among a million moments that I don't share here.

Somehow, I need to say that now. But I feel kind of...icky about it.

Because I feel that you (that is, YOU) have always understood this about our shared moments when you read. You've gone there with me, not thinking where we went WAS me. We go together knowing what we explore is often hard, and it matters, and it underpins all the other times when we aren't in angst but the reasons for it aren't gone. You know that we are all of us so complex as to be unknowable, even to ourselves. In this way, we are all gods in bodies.

(you do understand, don't you?)