Portrait.
I have just had a huge insight .. I couldn't understand why it is so difficult to write here when I pour out pages of e-mails every day without a thought. And why .. when I read back .. does it all seem so unlike me and really quite strange and alien and ... sort of annoying?

It is because .. not only is this the Ros3ncrantz and Gu1ldenstern of blogs .. it is also the equivalent of the Portrait in the Attic.

This is not me. This is just the side that I normally keep hidden and don't spend much time with even inside my own head. It is the self-pitying, pathetic part of my personality .. and it hardly ever even makes any jokes. How could I not notice this before? I am really, really not like this in true life ... I can make a stupid aside about ANYTHING however tasteless and unpromising .. and feel it is my duty to do so. Is the garbage receptacle aspect of this blog the reason for my appearing so much happier to the outside world? But that means all those dreary, weedy, mean little thoughts which once lurked in the sub-structure of my brain are now frolicking through cyber-space .. for ever .. While the cheerful, resilient (fairly), e-mail REAL ME has been deleted along with a pile of 'enlargement' spam.

Aaarrgghh! There is three years worth of writing here .. and about twenty percent of it isn't moaning. Think of the miles of e-mails and hours of phone conversations which I would rather have transcribed. All sparkling with amusing quips and filled with riveting gossip or little moments of my children's lives caught in amber. F.CK! It has been the terror of discovery which has ruined it all .. and the feeling that it was disloyal to write about my children in case I slanted it in a way that would hurt them if they ever arrived here. And the same goes for my friends. I was so angry with my husband at the beginning that I felt that nothing I could say would convey the hatefulness of his past behaviour so he wasn't off limits. But now even he is making an effort and a trickle of guilt has begun even there.

From reading this you know NOTHING about my life. Just some anecdotes from the distant past and odd musings about the weather .. and then pages and pages of self-examination. That is just weird. Do you see that I don't even talk about what I read .. when it isn't as much as a book a day but is roughly four books a week at least. Or what I listen to .. when I regularly buy CDs in huge manic bursts. Or what films I see or what TV I watch. You don't know any of my friends even by the most farcical of nicknames. Or what I do in London or my social life down here ... or even very much about the house .. or the garden .. I never say anything about politics or even the News.

Why? Is this peculiar or not? I am amazed now that there is anything to write down at all. Are my children or friends really ever likely to find this? Could I put in more about them in a way that they wouldn't mind .. or does that take away the whole point? I feel that something here has got to change .. enough with the introspection ... its time is over.
- posted by Iris @ 3/01/2006 09:45:00 PM comment