Definition

So, yeah, mmm hmmm, I guess I don't blog anymore?

I'm a total blogging cliché, the very person the anti-bloggers find annoying. I'm the blogger who is having an existential blogging crisis. Who am I? Why do I blog? What does it all mean??? Seriously, as if blogging were not by it's very nature the definition of self-absorbed, now I have to start processing and questioning and taking all to new heights.

The bottom line is this: I needed something when I started this blog. Like most bloggers, I needed a safe place to go with feelings that felt unsafe in any other context. I needed a place to be honest to the nth degree and a place to be raw in my chronicle of a difficult and beautiful time in my life. At the time that I started blogging, I was ruled by the pain and fear of knowing that my husband was going to die. I felt like a victim, and a victim-in-waiting. When I didn't feel like a victim, I would dress up as a martyr. My identity was built around the pivotal event of being cheated out of the life I'd wanted with the man I'd finally managed to find.

Don't get me wrong: I'm still flawed, and I'm often still angry, and I sometimes still feel like both a victim and a martyr. I am certainly still dealing with grief and have accepted that I always will. But I can honestly say that the experience of John's illness and death are no longer the core of how I define myself. I'm a person who experienced a great loss, a loss that has influenced who I am, to be sure. But it's a loss that on most days does not control me anymore.

This blog has been the place for me to examine my life through my grief. Through this lens, I've focused on parenting ad nauseum, dating to a certain extent, work, family, and friendship. For a long time, the grief was so overwhelming that I had something to say on these topics every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Now I find that to look at my life through grief-colored glasses more often than not feels forced and pandering. I feel like I'm supposed to write about grief, so I do, or try to, on the days when I'm there. But even when I'm there, it's not like I'm there, the way I used to be there, dwelling there, wallowing around.

It feels fake. For a person who prides herself on her honesty, that's the ultimate sin.

So instead of being fake, I've just been absent. Or I've blogged about shoes; those shoes were a real need, I'm here to tell you. The things about which I have some real, raw feelings aren't blog-appropriate in some instances these days, either because they involve people who don't want to be blogged about or work or certain aspects of family or various and sundry other things that I'm just not ready or willing to share.

Now that I've cleared the air, however, I think I will be ready and willing to share about some of those things. Now that I've said out-blogging-loud that this place does not exist solely for the sake of grief or my grief process or my dead husband or my sadness-related parenting fails or my widowhood-induced single-motherdom . . . now I can talk about all the other things that make me whole.

There's a lot more to me than grieving, anger, and sadness. Thankfully, there's a whole lot more.