Journaling
When we started this blog over a year ago, we never thought we’d maintain it for any length of time. We’d previously tried journaling in paper format and never been able to maintain it for longer than a week. We never knew what to say, and quite frankly the idea of writing down our thoughts was terrifying. This is possibly why we had so much trouble with doing a time-line with Liz on Monday. I know that we consider the written word incredibly important – our escape while growing up, was to curl up in the Sun somewhere and read for hours on end, escaping into an imagined world. Books and words were our safety, journaling and written based therapy exercises could be seen as a threat to that sense of safety. Online blogs aren’t tactile, and we associate online writing with work, so we can do this as it doesn’t have the same emotional ties that a book has.
In many ways, we treat this blog as our journal. The problem is that we know we have a small group of readers for our work here, so we can’t be as honest as we should and we get hung up with worrying about others perceptions of us. We’ve tried creating separate online journals, but each of these has failed over time. It is often when we need to write the most, that we shut down and don’t write anything. Instead of reaching out and trying to express/process the pain, we go back to our old coping mechanisms of cutting everything and everyone off. It’s only recently that I’ve been called on this – friends and Liz have accused me of shutting them out, I know I do it and can see it happening, but am powerless to stop it (at the moment).
Now that we have this site, we’re going to start another journal. Maybe this one will work, I don’t know. Today we went to the Zoo and it was interesting as Aimee wanted to write about the trip here. But she is 9 and nearly illiterate, I wouldn’t expose her/us like that here, but it is the sort of thing that we should add to a private blog. Looks like I’ll have to get M moving on creating the new private journal :)
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Now playing: Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (‘Eroica’), Op. 55: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai
via FoxyTunes
