Blogger locked-in syndrome. A note from the author, from the heart: ME.

I have been writing on Raising Men for about three years. Before that, I had about two or three notebooks and journals per year, since I was 12. I'm horribly sentimental and emotional - I am. I'm not going to sit here and try tell you how emotionally stable and together I am. One minute I'm (literally) bunny-hopping around the house with my toddlers, the next I'm crying buckets over Lexi in Grey's Anatomy. In a lot of ways I'm a lot like you and in other ways we have nothing in common. 

My biological father died when I was about Noah and Benjamin's age. I can never sit next to him and compare our hands, our eyes. I don't know much about him at all. My brother Neil died in a road accident when I was in my late teens and I have so little of him too. I remember we were picking out a photo for his funeral and we hardly had any. I was devastated. Even now, we don't have nearly enough photos and memories of him... But I'd been writing and taking pictures since way before then. See I always thought that's where this obsession with documenting came from. In many ways I'm a collector. I have boxes and boxes of sentimental junk - movie stubs from when I was  nine, rocks, chip packets, twigs, hair elastics - things that I can't even remember WHY I kept them in my memory box, but they're there. 

A lot of people blog, and a lot of it has become very stagnant. Old readers know that I was very personal in the beginning. I have never gone back and re-read any of those posts, nor any of my diaries from my early or late teens. I have more boxes and boxes of those that I've dragged from house to res to digs to home and back again over the years. I went back and converted a few old blog posts to drafts, like "The Deep End"  -the ones that I remember. Looking back, I can't believe how much I've grown. It took me a long time to adjust and completely fall in love with my life because everything was so... Unexpected, because I followed my heart too fast or not fast enough or at all. I had regrets. Everything is so much more dramatic and exciting when you're younger and unsettled. I was completely wild in every way, and I loved every minute of it. A lot of me felt trapped and unsatisfied for a long time, and a lot didn't make sense and everyone goes through these motions as they grow up and grow old. Someone quoted on twitter that the reason so many people feel insecure about their own lives is because you're comparing your behind-the-scenes with someone else's highlight reel. It's so true. 

For the most part and in general, I am a happy person. What makes me happy is not what makes you happy. I love questioning things, emotional things. I enjoy feeling and reading and being and Sylvia Plath and J.D Salinger, but I can also have a cute-attack over one of the bunnies scratching his nose. I'm not unhappy, not happy just... curious and trying. I'm so interested in people, communication, human behavior. I really am a modern-day Holden Caulfield, and I love that - I love being me, for the most part. I like the way I think and feel and I love the people that surround me. 

Each and every time that I talk openly online about sometimes feeling unsettled or depressed - overwhelmed, like I'm not achieving enough: I get a response from others - other human beings that have felt the same from time to time. We have all felt heartache, failure, rejection, disappointment and that is okay. Some people become introverted during those points, others eat a lot, some stop eating. Some people are very expressive about their feelings and reach out, while some people disappear completely. I write. Man alive if you could see the unpublished posts I've written, if you could see my draft folders, my emails to my friends. I write and try explain and reason with the obstacle at hand. My favorite person to write to is always my best friend Bethany or I write letters on paper to my dad that I never end up sending. For me, writing is so therapeutic; It's like it's out my heart - out my head - on to paper, and gone. I never read it or go back to it again. It's like a mental and emotional vomit that you flush away and never think about again. 

I also went through a phase where I pretended to be perfect and completely happy for about a year - even when I wasn't. For the most part, last year was probably the best of my little life to date, but there were some dark moments too - ones I didn't always share or publish. Some things really are private and sacred. For the past year I feel like I've been more of myself, like I've found my little voice and balance online. Like I've found a socially acceptable sort of crazy. When I say I'm happy - man I really am. When I say that I've got a bad case of the sads - then I really do. I'm always ricocheting between various emotions and dispositions. To the boys I'm a fun and silly mom, at work I'm a serious and intelligent businesswoman, juggling finances and strategies. To my husband I'm a best friend and seductress (lol) and between all of those there are a million tiny little things that need to be done and taken care of. Sometimes I love all of it, sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes I think I'm doing okay and other times I really worry if I'm doing the right thing, if I made all the right decisions - am I the best mom I can be? Are all our lives heading in the right direction? Can I recover from certain mistakes I've made - should I be doing any of this at all?

My life is not perfect. Your life is not perfect.If we all had to have an open show of our problems and put them on the table, I guarantee that we'd all grab our own ones back. There's a lot I don't talk about like that my mom is a little bit sick but I don't want to talk about that. Not today. I am not a fluffy, happy "look at me look at me" person (all the time). I still don't know completely who I am and what I want - I'm not even 30 yet, what do I know about anything? I look at my dad that has seen and fought in wars, lived all over the country and survived in the bush for months at a time with no food or supplies and I think "I actually don't know anything". I look at my mom that lived poorly as one of five children to unemployed parents, that lost her husband (love of her life) and had to raise three kids with no income - I look at how she made a huge success of her life, our lives, the business and properties, the success and then how she lost a son and I can't. When you go through so much, or watch other people go through so much... Everything becomes superficial. "Don't sweat the small stuff" my dad always says. He also says "Believe only half of what you see and nothing of what you hear." Another truth. 

When your life isn't perfect and when bad things happen - it is not a reflection on you. Things happen to all people - both good and bad. Some people make bad decisions, but we don't ask for the misfortunes that sometimes follow. We all roll the dice and close our eyes, cross our fingers and hope that it works out.  These bloggers and tweeters and our friends that talk about how perfect and happy everything is all the time, it's not real and if anything it's a false representation of your own life and character. I notice it because I used to do it too, and I know the back-end. I know the html that goes in to that pretty picture and it's not real. It also puts a pressure on you to keep being happier, busier, more awesome, more successful until your entire blog becomes a false representation of who you are. Who your family is. For me, pretending to be happy and perfect all the time was my darkest time, because it was the most lonely. I had also put an unrealistic pressure on my family and friends. When we were out, I'd snap away and there would be this understanding that these pictures were 'for' the blog, not for us. Not for memories. It was for the show. It's not like that now and it hasn't been like that for a while anymore, but during the dark days - it was. 

I got this comment in from a new reader yesterday, and it sparked this whole conversation and it made me realize how far I've come as a person, a writer, a mother. I want to reply to this reader and say thank you for again reminding me why I started all of this. One day this blog is going to be published to a book for my sons, for me. One day I'm going to take all the drafts you've never seen and publish them in all their honestly with integrity. Right now, I'm still keeping my memories. We all want to be heard - the universe is infinite and we all want to be noticed. Right back to cavemen that drew on to walls - they wanted to leave a message of "I was here - I existed, this is my story." That need for recognition. We see it everywhere, right up to high school with names carved in to desks and declarations of love written on the back of bathroom doors in lipstick. Vandalism, or is it just human beings looking for their presence, their big fat "I was here... And I mattered." This was the comment from a reader yesterday, and it meant so much. You don't know what it's like sometimes. Our relationship is very one-sided. I have no idea what any of you think of me, my thoughts, my memories and my fears. What other people think of you is none of your business, and that's not why I write. I write because I want to matter, I want my life to matter. I want a documentation of what I went through - like this is my caveman painting and one day my body will turn to dust and earth and my children will move on without me and their children and theirs and the world doesn't stop, ever. I'm trying to make it stop for me, for my family. The comment: 

"I have known about your blog for a while. I heard people talking about "Raising Men" a lot. But I never actually read it. Mostly, to be honest, because I knew it was a "mommy blog", and because I am not remotely ready to have kids. And then, for some reason, I started reading it. And I got completely sucked in. I went right back to the beginning and have been reading it a bit like a novel. 

I have just looked at the clock and seen that it is after 4. Fok. I have done FRIGHTENINGLY little work today. I was actually irritated when I had to go to a meeting earlier.

You write so beautifully, but mostly I have just been blown away by your honesty. But this is exactly what blogging should be about - a window into a life. The start of a conversation. Honest. Engaging. Funny. Profound. Thought-provoking. And I'm only on 2011! Christ. I might as well kiss productivity goodbye for the rest of the week. Well, that's fine."

Thank you so much for your comment and for reminding me why I started all of this - reminding me to be real and to document with integrity and honestly - within my sacred limits and privacy. To writing - in all it's unsolicited glory x