Ok so who can I blame this time for my lengthy break in service? Sadly I can't blame the website manager or a software problem, more like a motivational issue with my good self!
Avoidance is a wonderful thing & I've been realising recently I'm pretty good at it, particularly when it comes to things that are slightly uncomfortable. So, I hear you asking, why would you find blogging uncomfortable?
Well without too much analysis, firstly it's been because I have been quite poorly. Not mental illness this time, no a very physical illness (which I've had on and off for many years & which did spur me on to write initially as it's made me face my own mortality) & is believed to be an auto-immune condition (still on steroids, though they help amazingly:) Awh I hear you sigh (maybe I am hearing extra noises!!) poor you and I guess that is partly why I didn't want to write about it. I mean I don't want lots of sympathy, nor do I want to bore the leg off you, the reader, with my dull tales of endless medical waiting rooms.
Secondly I think I would like to change how I write on the blog & didn't feel up to figuring that out. I mean it might not turn out to be very different when I try it, but I guess I would like to write more objectively than subjectively, i.e more about other things and less about myself.
The reason this blog has been so much about me personally is that following the publication of
Beyond the Edge I felt that I hadn't said enough in the book about my life in recovery. Also I wanted to give a snapshot into my life after getting published & banish any ideas that published writers are in any way 'special". Anyway, if I can find the time in the future (between writing a second book, working part-time in a school doing the odd bit of washing etc) I'd like to comment and refer to wider issues. Also I'd love it if you as the reader (there may well only be one:) would comment too.
So to end with a thought that kind of reinforces my aforementioned musings. Naughtily I skipped church this morning to write (should be my book but then decided to blog) & before I started I was reading an article over breakfast that my husband recommended in yesterday's paper entitled
'God's Boxer'. It's an interview with
Rowan Williams, (which despite not being an anglican I found helpful & interesting).
One of the themes of this interview is that 'Christianity should be an escape from self, not an indulgence of it' as Rowan has previously written "Jesus is the human event that reverses the flow of human self-absorption." Later in the article Rowan (is it ok for me to call him that?) distinguishes between self-absorption & self-scrutiny saying that the former thinks the most interesting thing in the world is myself whereas the later, which soberly examines ones self, is deeply part of the Christian experience.
I have often worried about '
Beyond the Edge' being a reflection of my self-absorption rather than self-scrutiny but through this article am encouraged "to lay down the heavy burden of self-justifcation" & being angst ridden but instead remember the words of Mother
Mary Clare who said "you don't have to suffer for the sins of the world darling. It's been done."
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