all in the past...

Everyone has something in their past that has helped to build them into the person that they are in the present.  It might be a happy childhood.. a favourite aunt… a friend… a once in a lifetime experience or a torrid relationship.

How people deal with these things differ from person to person and situation to situation.

In 2000 I started to visit a chat room for a band.  It was great… it was fun and it introduced me to a lot of people from all over the world who had a common interest.  I even helped to organise and take part in a number of meet ups for the fans in the UK and I am still firm friends with a few of those people.  One of the people I met was a really nice guy and… despite the fact that he lived 5,000 miles away in Oregon… our online relationship turned into something more and… before I knew it… we were conducting a Long Distance Relationship… madly in love with each other making plans for marriage and immigration.

Over the course of our relationship we met a number of times… him coming to the UK… me and my daughter going to the USA. He proposed… I accepted… we started the long immigration process… we spoke… either on the phone or by way of the internet… almost every day.  I got ready to sell my house.

There is no getting away from it… it was tough… very tough… but we somehow made it work..

I found that my blog was the perfect place to vent… to talk about what was happening… about dealing with that whole experience of being engaged to man who lived 5,000 miles and whom I adored.  I thought that any time I spent with my fiance… be it in person… on the phone or the net… was just too precious to spend whining and moaning about not being with him… so I wrote.   I wrote about all the things that concerned me… made me happy…. and made me cry… including how fabulous it was when we were together… and how incredibly hard it was on me when we were apart… how difficult the visa process was that we had to go through to move to the USA and how we were coping with it all.

With retrospect I should have been more realistic about how successful our relationship was going to be… I was devoted to making it work… at any expense… however his committment and honesty were… in reality… far removed from what he was telling me.

That relationship is now over… but I continue to blog… and no doubt as I do blog I’ll discuss the relationship.  I do so for different reasons… the main hope being that writing about what I went through will help me move on from it.   I am accepting of the fact that it will be hard to move on from this as it consumed my life for a long time. I guess I use that as a warning to people who stumble across my blog looking for witty insight or political thoughts… you won’t find it here… I write… I blog… about the things that happen in my life and about my feelings… which aren’t that exciting…

I did think for a short period of time that I would just stop  blogging… thinking that perhaps I didn’t “need” to blog anymore… but I find that blogging serves the same purpose I used to get from writing in my notebook… It helps me deal with things and cope with them.

I’ve always been “cagey” as my Father used to call it… I don’t open up to my friends about things that trouble me or concern me… people have so much crap going on in their own lives that they don’t need to hear other people’s problems… I’ve always believed that….. and so I guess I just prefer to moan and whine to my blog.. It’s that friendly ear I need when I can’t sleep.. or I’m having issues with work and need to vent… or just want to talk about things… and don’t want to trouble people with the bullshit in my life.

A good place to start is the beginning… which is at the start of 2004 when I really needed to start venting about stuff.  You can use the archives or just click this link.  I am still in the process of moving this to Tumblr and if you get something… anything… out of what I have written here… let me know… it would kinda make me feel as though I didn’t waste my time.