Well. Hello.

It’s been awhile.

There’s definitely a layer of dust on this blog.

 

I write most of my thoughts on tumblr.  It’s my comfort zone.  I know a core group of there.  But I think the biggest reason I feel more comfortable over there is that the environment feels different.

Over here it feels like most of the folks I see are putting people in the sitting room and serving tea.

Few if any people are crying in pain from the various disasters that are drifting through their lives.  They are talking about the disaster in the past – ie it’s a thing I overcame.

No one is venting their anger at spouses.  They are telling humorous stories of spousal quirks.

People aren’t talking about how they can barely breathe from anxiety or how they can barely move from depression.  They talk about how they manage it.

Nothing about their addicted family member beating them.  They are talking about their kids or dogs.

Nothing about failing to pay bills.  They talk about it being tight and this is a great cheap meal.

No guilt about how selfish they feel for being angry at the person they are being caregiver to.  Just the martyred exhaustion of caretaking.

In tumblr, or at least in the group I follow, there is much more of a reality spread.  It’s not the sitting room.  It’s the family room that hasn’t been cleaned in 2 weeks.  People are talking about the stuff that is too ugly to say in real life.  Because it’s there and it’s hard and sometimes you need to say it.

Most of tumblr is a large visual reblog machine.  But there is a very small subset of people who have formed a community.  And it’s just people being real.  We talk about our lives and we scream about politics and we post kitten pictures and we spout our opinions or we share our interests.  Sometimes we bicker.  It’s friendship.

I think I stopped coming here because while I do post quite a bit of non-personal stuff on tumblr, it’s also where I share my dirty family room.   It feels like home.  People who have seen my life deteriorate and implode and slowly get built back up to this point and have never made me feel less than supported are there.

But it’s dying.  Fewer and fewer people go there.  And I need to find a new place for my family room.

I refuse to do Facebook.  I won’t show my family room to my real life friends and family.  I don’t trust them with it.   They can see a sitting room version of me.  And I really don’t care to invest the effort in constantly cleaning up the sitting room to show them.  My life is hard enough.  Having to construct a virtual sitting room for a constant stream of visitors is not where I want to waste my energy.

Perhaps, if I show my family room here it will be OK.  But it doesn’t feel like it will.  Possibly because you all didn’t watch the arc of turmoil that has been my life for the last 8 years.  But mostly because showing your family room to people who invite you into the sitting room feels awkward.

But maybe that’s just me projecting.  I have to find a new place for the Family Room.  Tumblr is dying.  And my need for a place to share remains.

6 thoughts on “Well. Hello.”

  1. You’re right about Tumblr, it’s dying. At least as a community. That’s why I pulled the plug. I still follow a few people over there, but that’s all. The changes they’ve made over there discourage the sense of community that it originally had while it’s refusal to do anything to eliminate the spambots, pornbots and other abusive elements has made it increasingly toxic over there. It seems to have turned into little more than an endless reblogging system that discourages original content.

    Facebook – (shudder). Facebook is a legalized scam that exists solely to harvest data that it can then turn around and sell to others.

    It is indeed a different environment here, and it takes time to get used to it. Don’t let the change intimidate you. It’s your blog. Yours. You can do whatever you want to do here

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  2. I LOVE your analogy and ache that your place of acceptance is slowly fading. I still haven’t found mine so sometimes, the doors on my “family room” (if I may borrow your wonderful phrase) fly open here; very unprofessional of me or so many people say. What’s funny to me though, is that those “real me, life sucks right now” posts that seem to go without any views at all.

    Oh well, sending you wishes for a new safe place to be freely you :-).

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  3. Your analogy regarding Fbook is quite apt. I can relate. I think it’s been 6 years since I deactivated my account. Fbook is certainly not a place to be real or raw … Or if you are the price is disproportionately heavy. Every time I get an inkling to start Fbook again I read something like your post and it quickly smothers that desire. Thank you.

    Never been on Tumblr though so can’t share any thoughts about that.

    I do think sharing your feelings and writing about the dark side of one’s life can be quite cathartic making one not feel like the only one in the world eating a sht sandwich! Let’s all eat our sht sandwiches together in the family room leaving some crumbs on the floor …

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