A common theme

It's always refreshing to read that other bloggers are going through the same things I am.

I've started writing about memories, I suppose, because writing about the present has become more difficult as of late. Krissa over at le petit hiboux summed it up quite well today, asking the question that has been popping up on various sites lately:

How can I get more personal without essentially telling people to not comment to me anything they read about, or without vetting it with Stuart first? How can I still blog if it's just going to be pat, neatly-tied-up-with-a-catchy-moral tidbits that bore me on other sites?

The tendancy to self-edit is a bitch. One that never even dawned on me back when I started on madderrain in 2000. I didn't care if I was remarking on how I did on a paper/exam or if I was describing the latest in a series of personal frustrations. I just wrote it. It's not like anyone actually read the thing.

Cryptic references began to slip in without my realization, but I still remained pretty faithful to the process of writing what I was thinking. Until about January, when I began a long, relatively intense series of correspondence with someone I'd discussed here. Some of it was favorable, a lot of it around that time wasn't. I was willing to stand by what I'd written, but never thought I'd have to defend it, as I hadn't expected him to read it.

Awkward does not even begin to describe how it felt. And I wanted to write about it. But the tables suddenly felt as if they'd turned. I couldn't write about it because that was what prompted it in the first place. I didn't want to seem hurtful - I wanted to show that I respected what he had to say. Besides, now that I knew he knew where the blog was, I knew he had an opportunity to gain insight in the coversation, whereas I didn't. It felt like an unfair advantage - or, disadvantage, I should say.

I haven't written much about him since, despite a desire to do so on several occasions. Is it that he won - that he'd convinced me not to write critical observations because he'd explained himself? Was it that I didn't really have much to say?

No, it was that I didn't want him to know that it affected me - and that I was suddenly scared of the idea of him seeing what I had to say. At its most effective, the writing here can reveal things about myself I might not normally throw into conversation. I'm not likely to walk up to someone I know passingly well and begin to discuss my fears or hopes.

I self-edited. I still do.

Sometimes my friends anger me. Sometimes a long friendship comes to a close and I'm upset about it. Sometimes I have no idea what someone I know was thinking. These should, in theory, be things I write about. Because writing about it helps me sort it out.

But they read and might not understand the context in which I'm trying to compose my thoughts.

I self-edit.

Am I chickening out by doing so? I don't know. Part of me says I am, but another part says I'm being wise about it. Not perpetuating already emotionally-charged situations.

So perhaps it's a little of both. By being wise, I am taking the easy route.

Am I compromising myself and what I try to do in my writing by doing this?

I'm not sure. But it's something to think about while I try recreating a moment from the past in story form.