This blog contains no secrets but it exists to I can say to myself things I would not say to others. So that I can steam emotional pain out of myself. So that I can find out how far things go. So that I can look at my words and find out which have hidden truths and which only lead back to some irrationalities I learned early on.
I did not expect comments, but I got one after about six months. Now I get more and I like them, and I think blogs are very interesting as a form of group therapy. But, I do not blog as myself hiding under a pseudonym, I blog as someone else; I say things I wouldn’t, and give responses I am just trying out.
This is because in real life I acquiesce to too much, defer to too much, and I am trying to learn not to. The point of the blog is to learn to speak; before I either did not speak or only spoke in the most diplomatic terms. In the past I have been known to fly to foreign countries so as to speak my mind into the wind.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
You are a balm against cognitive dissonance.
!!! Wow! I am trying, but I didn’t know it was working that well for others! 🙂
I can see your point. I’ll miss you if you close down, though; sometimes the things you say to yourself are things that help other people see clearly, as well.
I’m not really going to close down, and it’s partly for that reason.
I’ve also made some actual friends through the blog.
But, it seems that some people who know who I really am, think everyone else does, too, and think this is just a mask. They don’t realize that profacero and Realname Me won’t say all the same things, and that profacero is both more and less than Realname Me.
Our blogselves are not our real selves. Our professorial selves are not our real selves. Our being-with-friends selves are not our real selves. These are all aspects of the self, but the real self is always elsewhere and is always, really, unknown.
I continue to enjoy your blog.
Hi Geoffrey! 🙂
DEH, yes. But the difference between how I use the blog and how I interact in every other context is, the blog really is all about me. I may have reasoned conversations on it like this one, but the blog is not only not a professional blog, it really is all about me, no matter how much contorted pain I am expressing or how odd or harsh it sounds.
You can’t do that with, say, a therapist: there you have to give them a more global idea of how well you are or not, because if you express extreme pain they will go into management mode and you won’t get anything actually addressed.
So in real life I’m always being professional, or friendly, or compromising, or reasonable, or something like that and in the blog persona I’m as unreasonable as I want to be and I don’t care — and it’s the only venue in which I allow this.
“So in real life I’m always being professional, or friendly, or compromising, or reasonable, or something like that and in the blog persona I’m as unreasonable as I want to be and I don’t care — and it’s the only venue in which I allow this.”
-This is what people so often don’t understand about blogging.
Please don’t close down! I’ve achieved many important insights after reading your posts. I don’t want to lose that.
I won’t really. But it does mean I’ll still fume about any old wound I want to cure, no matter how nice and well meaning the person is who pushes on the bruise, as it were.
I should be like Jennifer when she had her blog, and not say “leave a reply” but “comment at your own risk.”
Don’t fume, dear Z. We love your blog and would be very sorry if you closed it down.
Oh, but I always fume! And I won’t close it down. I love you, too, WI!