Not for you, coherent and together people
This blog is not for people who have themselves packaged together coherently. I’m sure any of those folks would do a quick eye-roll and press “skip” to something productive or edifying for their put-together lives.
It’s for me
I may look like a well-balanced person from the outside. But the reality is that as I age and confront challenges, I’m not a person who can get up, know where she is headed, and arrive there without annoying meanders. Degrees and other accomplishments do not mean much when you spend your days wondering where life ran off the rails and then chasing a satisfying state that is now unknown.
The reality is that I don’t have much to say about anything on a blog other than my life and how I’m trying to make peace with it as I age, fall apart, and confront unwelcome change.
Why public?
First, I’m not trying to recruit readers, so there is only one reason for public writing. Airing my thoughts to a potential “public” person helps me sort through life tangles.
Writing sensibly is not an easy task for me. I’m random and scattered. I struggle to spell. I don’t readily see typos, so coherence takes lots of effort. But as I write to a mythical audience in order to make sense of my complicated past or current discomfort, I pull incoherence together and find a path forward.
Right now, completing some writing and putting it into readable order is a good discipline as I reel through life with moving parts I often feel I have little control over. Coherence helps me find an accountable path through an overgrown jungle of my mental and physical health, and in my relationships with loved ones who are fighting deep life battles.
I was naive in my hard-working 60s to think that my ancient age would be more managed with fewer moving parts. I was wrong. Now, I must stop muddling and find more intentional paths forward. And imagining an audience helps.
Gratitude
So I’m grateful if you are reading this. Organizing feelings and laying down thoughts in a public way seems to steady me as much as therapy. It helps me see beauty in tangles.
And, writing is a whole lot cheaper.