Sorrow, Shame and Regret

Frequently I've heard the argument that the point of blogging is, ultimately, about giving the one who feels powerless and unloved the ability to reach across the world and pretend, for a moment, that people actually care. After all, there must be a reason why bloggers commit their thoughts to the public space instead of a sealed diary.

In other words, blogging is for sad people.

I don't agree. I think there are political and philosophical bloggers who blog because they really do have something to say: they say it and people learn by reading it.

In my case, I blog when I feel like it, because I feel like it. Over at the other place I write more rationally and keep it sensible. Here I give free rein to things I would never write in a diary. Not because no-one would read it, but because if I know I am writing for myself only, I cannot write. I feel pretentious and sententious and my style goes to pot (stop laughing at the back there).

I can only put finger to keyboard if I think there is point: setting down thoughts does not count as point, since they exist in my head anyway and aren't going anywhere. So I need the sense that it will be read, if only by a robot, to make me write. And I need to write or I go mad.

So tonight I want to set down a few thoughts. Everything I am now suffering I deserve: I asked for it all, I made it all happen, I suffer through my freely chosen actions. I live in a cloud of sadness. I do regret things, even blogposts I could take down if I wanted but won't.

Not all of it is my fault, to be fair. But everything I feel I feel because I created it all. And there I was worrying I wasn't creative enough. Actually I am very creative. I take a good, strong, working body, a brain with enough energy to hold down two good jobs - and exceed all targets there - and to do an A Level in maths, a soul that tangles itself every day with the (non) existence of God and purpose, a heart that holds a woman, another one, and a third, all in love; this is a working personality.

Yet - it doesn't work. It just doesn't work, never has.

But here I come to set down exactly what I feel, and why I feel it, and why you should care, and nothing comes but lines of deleted text. I was all ready to write masses of self-justifying whining, paragraphs of explanations, pleas into the endless silence to reclaim what I have lost; and nothing comes. I cannot say it, despite the promise of an audience and despite the wish to lay down my sadnesses. With everything I have I want to write it all, and make it permanent, and give it to someone else. Somehow this will take it outside of me, or broadcast it to the right ears.

But they are turned away, and rightly so. And the world has its own problems. This is why some writers encode these things in "semi-autobiographical" novels, or those awful poems about the narrator, who is always the same as the poet.

Others stay silent, as they should, and as the world demands.

And the sadness dies with them, and is gone.