On Being Personal

Yesterday I went back and read my posts from late last year, including the many posts I created when I had kidney stone problems. And I can really tell that I was on painkillers with some of them! I was pretty forthcoming with some personal details, and I keep thinking about that fine line between being informative and getting too personal.

My problem is that I want to be personal, and I am constantly feeling myself pull back on the reins, pairing down my posts, or scratching them altogether. And it's probably a good decision every time. (This post, for example, is personal AND boring, and should be deleted immediately). One thing that often worries people is that strangers can read your personal feelings when you blog about them. But what also bothers me is that being personal can turn into something long and negative, which I always regret later. Life is hard, and if you let loose you can really irritate people with unimportant details or complaints. That or you depress them so much that they think your life is akin to a plague and that you are two beats away from running into traffic. Neither of which are true for me.

Today is 6 months after October 24th exactly, and it's even a Friday as well. That was a bad day for me. And the facts haven't slipped from my mind, they never do; it's my own personal elephant for every room. It's 6 months later, and the world has strangely gone back to being very much like before October 24th, while still being inalterably changed. I feel like I appear to be a normal human being with arms and legs and a head, but I'm not, I'm an alien with an extra invisible limb that only I can see.

Now doesn't that sound like the life-plague thing? It's not a plague. Everybody has little griefs they carry around with them, making up the fabric of who they are. But I want desperately to tell you all about my elephant, my invisible limb, because it's ever-present to me, but it just seems too negative, too sad, too personal.

To be honest, some of the blogs that stand out most to me are ones that do get personal. But they're very well-written and deeply honest and they touch on universal human feelings and usually have a glimmer of hope or belief that the future will be better. One comes to mind - Nie Nie. She is a popular blogger, and last August was in a plane crash. She was hospitalized for several months, and was only able to start blogging again - slowly - in January. Her posts now have a lot to do with her recovery, her efforts to stay positive, and she describes it all in this intensely personal way. I'm fascinated.

Here are a couple of lines from her that stand out to me.

First from March 4th:
Seconds after the plane crashed I found myself lying under a beautiful large tree. It’s leaves fluttered in the wind. Lying with burns over my entire body I longed to be a leaf up there twirling in the wind instead of in pain and on the ground. When residents of St. Johns AZ came to my rescue, I asked them to help me up- it was dinnertime and I needed to go home and feed my family.

Next from Feb 7th:
Mr. Nielson tucked me safe and sound into bed that night. Mindy was singing softly in the background. My eyes welled up as he pulled me close to him.
"This is only temporary...you are a beautiful work in progress" Then he lay next to me and when he thought I was asleep, he patted me and said
"girl, I love you"
Then got up to put away the dinner dishes.

Her blog has been so much about the pain she is in, the difficulty of getting better, her inability to do things like hold her youngest child. But it is also about the glimmers of happiness she has, the small victories, the meaningful people in her life, and the small progress day by day. It makes me want to see beauty in every part of life, even the tragic. And that's what's so intimidating about being personal, because if you can do it in a way that edifies even when things are dismal, then it seems worth the exposure and the insecurity. Not that I'm trying to be a martyr for readers' sake. I guess I just think that there's a right way and a wrong way to be personal, and I feel like it's impossible for me to know the difference when I write. So a lot is left in silence that wants very much to be said.