Radio Silence

Breaking the blogging silence is an intimidating and awkward thing to do, especially when it’s gone on for a while. You know what I mean. Let’s be honest: everybody’s probably expecting something pretty profound, right? I mean, after all that time I’ve had to ponder and contemplate, surely I would have come up with something pretty touching and poetic.

Well…..I hope you’re not holding your breath.

But you have such an interesting life. Surely you have loads to write about!

Yes, it’s true. I do have an interesting life. But I also have a difficult one filled with disappointments and tragedy and crisis, of which very few are my own but all of which I witness in the lives of friends and strangers on a near-daily basis. And is that side of my life the kind of ‘blog’ material you’re looking for?  That is the question. See, I struggle with this. What makes a good blog? From the blogs I read and the blogs that I know other people read, it seems that an awful lot of us like the poetic, moving (real life, of course) stories that wrench your heart and give you a little kick in the pants to become a better person (albeit parent, spouse, Christian) while still wrapping up snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug in a nice feel-good ending.

And in walks my little dilemma: rarely does my life look, act, feel, smell, taste, sound – you name it – anything like this. So, I wonder, do people really want to read the smelly, tear-smudged, irritating, frustrating, painful stories I have to tell? Sometimes I think, yes, they want to read them. So I start writing a blog only to second-guess myself half-way in. Sometimes my stories can be hopeful. Sometimes they can be light. But honestly, more often than not, they are heavy and difficult and even I struggle to find a ‘moral’ in those stories.

Most often, I have not blogged because I don’t know how to tell my stories without scaring readers or depressing them or perhaps offending them.

Life among the poor is not fertile ground for happy endings.

But I have resolved over the next few months to do my best to tell the stories of the tiny shoots of joy and happiness I see peeking out of the dirt. They are there; but sometimes I must retrain my eyes to see them amidst the thorns.