I have recently had several events take place that have led me to question the usefulness of this journal to me in its current format. I have found myself editing the content to avoid hurting people’s feelings, or leaving out events that happened to protect people’s privacy, or shortening the content to keep other people from complaining about the length of my posts, or putting in the day-to-day events so that people can feel like they’re here with me. Not all of these things are bad, but combined together, they have made this journal into something that isn’t mine anymore. It’s being written for someone else and not for me, hence the reason that several people who have seen me in person recently have expressed their relief that I wasn’t as tweaked as this journal would seem to have implied.
Being that part of this journey for me is to identify who I am and what I want, and being that I have begun to grasp this in recent days and weeks, I am changing this journal to be about what I want to write about. To me, this journal serves several purposes:
1) To keep people up-to-date on where I am and how I am doing (which keeps me from having to write a billion emails that all say the same thing)
2) A place for me to work out my issues about the things that are showing up along the journey for me. A point of self-exploration and a place to write my definitions. A log of where I’ve been along the path that may help me to write the story of this journey at the end of it.
3) A point of last resort in the event that something went horribly wrong and the police needed to find me (hence the inclusion of people’s real names in the log on July 2). This last one is not something that I am concerned about since I can feel the protection of spirit around me, but I am, at the very least, pragmatic and it is prudent to offer this.
Now, I am not immune to the concepts of marketing and the rules of privacy, so here’s the deal. Each time I post, I will be writing the mundane, day-to-day events in one post and my inner thoughts, feelings, beliefs, in another. Neither one is guaranteed to be short since I have a full and eventful life, so if the posts are too long for you, don’t read them. If you are part of my life and I am likely to write about you and you would like me to use a pseudonym for you, please let me know (preferably before I post anything about you so I don’t have to spend a lot of time editing). In general, I don’t share anything about anyone else that doesn’t directly relate to something I’m saying about me and my journey, but sometimes that does mean that I share some stuff. So don’t be afraid to speak up.
Now, the second part of this is that I have friends who are not livejournal (LJ) members who only get to read the public section postings. I have taken more and more often to writing friends-only or private posts because I didn’t want to deal with comments from the peanut gallery, but these are things that I would have liked to have shared with certain people. So, I am going to ask a favor of those who would like to receive my friends postings – if you don’t have an LJ account, please get one. You can get one for $25 direct from LJ, or you can get a free access code from someone with a paid account. If you don’t know anyone who has a paid acct and you need a code, let me know and I’ll try to get a code for you. If someone wants to make this easier for everyone, they could upgrade my account to a paid account and then I would have access codes to give out to anyone who needed them.
I understand that there is a filter process which one can use to send things to only certain people on a list. I will be researching this process and making an effort to generate this list. Again, without certain people being LJ members, this will be a little more complicated. I have resorted to cutting and pasting into email in the past, but that’s a huge hassle. So if you don’t get onto LJ, you may just miss out on stuff.
So that’s the deal. I am done pandering to everyone else’s feelings and whims in my journal. This is my life and my journal. I am who I am and I’m through changing that for other people. If you don’t like it, the plane rides are $3 – CASH.**
** Update 2013 – This last comment is a reference to Richard Bach’s book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I’ve read this book at almost every major life-changing moment in my life since I was 16. It’s referencing the moment when Richard (the author and protagonist) finally GETS that life isn’t about making other people happy, it’s about making yourself happy.
* This is part of an ongoing series of posts detailing what happened on a spiritual pilgrimage that I took in 2002. To start from the beginning, go to July 2, 2013. To see the entire spiritual journey as it gets published, click on the category “You Want Me To Do WHAT?!!?” to see all of the posts.
