As I sat down this evening to write in my journal I was full of anger.. annoyance.. disappointment… disillusionment… and I wanted to rant. I wanted to moan and complain and whine about how I’m feeling about being let down again and again and again by the same person over and over but I stopped myself and, as I sat looking at the screen… I realised that the reason I didn’t want to type the things I was bursting to say was because I didn’t want to open myself up to the ridicule of people who I can’t even to claim to have a fleeting acquaintence with. The few (around 5) regular visitors to my journal. I didn’t want any of them to say quietly.. under their breath.. as they read what I was saying.. “sucker… fool.. idiot…”

This made me start thinking about how much I have changed the way I write over the years since I have been putting my thoughts on the net rather than in the privacy of my paper journal. I have copious journals… I’ve written my thoughts down intermittently for just about as long as I can remember. I have a couple of archive boxes packed tight with all my books I have written in over the years.  I still have one that sits in one of my drawers under my bed. I last used it in Oregon in July of 2004.

Since meeting My Boy over 5 years ago now I have used my various online journals to vent about things that were upsetting me in my life and my long distance relationship. Instead of bleating on about things to him and people close to me I figured that it was better to whine and moan about how crappy everything was to an anonymous audience. After all my friends and My Boy have far more imortant things going on in their lives than me complaining about how long forms take to be processed or how shitty it was that I couldn’t stay awake to talk to My Boy or how much I miss him when I wake up in the mornings and he isn’t there beside me. Stupid stuff yanno.. Some people would argue that I should be able to talk about things like this with My Boy… but I just don’t want to because our time is just too precious to spend whining about things that frustrate and upset me..

My Boy told me about 10 months ago that he had been reading my journal. Apparently a mutal internet “friend” of both us pointed him in the direction of my journal quite a long time ago and he had never read it… but.. when we were going through a particularly hard time last Christmas he did.. to try to see how I was coping. It opened his eyes to how I was feeling in a big way but he couldn’t quite help himself from being hurt by some of the things I said. He didn’t (and still doesn’t) quite understand that I would rather vent here.. than to him. I’ve always been like this. I will moan and complain about a lot of things.. but I rarely moan and complain to the people involved. I’m a pleaser.. I like things to go smoothly… I don’t like to upset the apple cart so to speak. I’ll whinge and moan in the privacy of my own space and time.. its easier that way and less confrontational…

I asked My Boy to stop reading my journal within a few weeks of being told that he was reading it because I found that I would get things off my chest in my journal.. and then he would read it three days later or whatever and bring shit up again and try to go over stuff that had upset me three days previously and I had gotten over already.

I then found log in details for to my Site Meter and it opened me up to the people who read my blog. I found out from where in the world people came from… how often they read my journal. Lets make this clear… I don’t publish my journal for other people to read… I mean.. I know other people read it.. but I don’t write for them.. I write for me… or at least… I did. The people who read my journal are people I’ll never meet… they could pass me in the street if I were to happen upon them… they don’t know me from Adam nor I they…. So why am I doing one of the things that I have always been a great critic of???

Why am I censoring my thoughts and writings??? Why am I avoiding subjects because I am worried about the opinions of the very few people who read my journal?

Why?

As confident as I may appear on the outside to people who don’t know me.. I have one huge failing… I care what people think of me.. no matter how fleeting my relationship is with them. I have huge issues with other peoples opinions of me even though I don’t ask for people’s opinions or guidance about what I am dealing with or going through.

I can pretty much pinpoint the time when I started censoring what I was writing. One comment months ago shook me. Not because of what was said.. but because of how it affected me…. They gave their opinion on something… and that opinion actually differed from what I had been telling myself for so long.. and it made feel as though I have been making a fool of myself for so long.. so very very long.

I am going to endeavour to return my journal to what it is meant to be… what it started out as… what it should be… a place for me to write about things affecting me in my life…

That being said.. how do I do that? I have no clue really… some of the links will go.. the Site Meter definately goes.. the blog board… other things.. I may remove the comments thingy too but one thing I want to make clear is this…. I want the few regular visitors to my journal to understand that this is nothing to do with recent comments or people who have recently been looking at my journal… its about ME and the way I have been writing…

My journal is meant to be about what I want to say.. not about what I think people want to read…..

I don’t know if that makes sense really.