Multiple Reflections

we think a big part of our silence and inability to write much the last year or two has been this growing fear, worry, anxiety, and awareness that with the right key words, our mother could find our journal. in knowing Sean, it opens us up to her or family searching his full name or what not and a few more key words and our site is surely to be found. we resisted the whole facebook thing, but we finally signed up and of course the mother is a friend along with other family and friends… and many we haven’t even searched for, added, etc., and we’re keenly aware that given the right circumstances, a click here or there if some of our friends’ privacy settings are low that eventually it could lead to our journal.

then there has always been the awareness that we’re so out there or at least can be and there’s always the chance that our mother could accidentally stumble upon our site or someone else who knows enough about me and my life and put things together. if someone read enough, and they knew my mother or my family, they’d probably put it together, even if we used pseudonyms for the people in our life that we mention by first name in our journal. this is why we finally settled on that debate regarding whether to use pseudonyms or not– we decided it didn’t wholly matter as anyone knowing us and our life, family, friends, etc. could figure out who was who even with pseudonyms and so it didn’t make sense. we know on some level which people in our life absolutely require complete anonymity and hope that others who might take issue with it would let us know.

anyway, so we’re thinking that this fear, worry, anxiety, etc. is behind a large part of the silence and struggle with writing anything in our journal. we used to write daily or almost daily… though some of those journal entries are not posted here because we still have to import them. we’ve done a reasonable amount of journal writing in our handwritten journal throughout these periods of silence, but that hasn’t been scanned here.

we want to be the ones with the courage, the braveness, the openness, rawness, etc. that we see other friends and bloggers do. we admire that so much. we want to not care or to feel free to reveal, to tell how it is, to help others in some way hopefully, to share with those who know us (and we know they’ve been to our site or been given the info) so that they can know how we’re doing if they want to know. we want a strong living record of our life, our healing journey, our thoughts, feelings, etc., because so much of it is forgotten and lost somewhere and so much more is captured with words… and words we can return back to for reference, patterns, growth, healing, etc.

instead the silence lives and we argue and are divided inside about so many different thoughts, ideas, feelings, philosophies, dynamics, etc. regarding whether to journal or not journal. we’ve debated whether to go to all password posts and whether to just push past all of this and be an open book and whether there is some kind of balance. in the midst of all of this, we end up at this standstill, the standstill and safety of silence. but where does that get us? silence eventually leads to a sense of failure, badness, shame, etc. of its own making because we aren’t writing when there is so so so much going on inside that we need to share, want to share, explore, and take further along that writing and processing brings for us. instead it just sits within, spinning, circling, withering away, with only a small chance of living and not being buried deep within with everything else. our life is about burying things. it is so automatic. even the good things… they get lost or buried and we’re left with only the hope it will be remembered instead of splintered and scattered pieces or nothing of it left.

we know it really boils down to whether we can handle our mother or someone else we know that we prefer to keep this journal private and away from them, from whether we can handle and accept that happening and the potential effects of that. we aren’t worried about the father because we’re pretty sure he is fairly computer illiterate or really doesn’t use a pc much at all. there’s always the worry that if we post links or info about a certain friend that our brother might decide to google her and eventually find our site and then that would be bad as our family would then know.

there’s just so much about this topic and issue and there’s a lot more bottom lines that we know exist besides what we just wrote. we’re not sure how to settle this within as there are loud and competing philosophies and ideas and stuff about this topic and uggh, it sucks.

this has been going on for us for a long time, and we’ve been fighting it within for a long time, and lately it seems, the silence is winning the battle. the ‘do nothing’, ’say nothing,’ etc. because it is safer seems to be the default right now. and there are quite a few of us that want it different or think we want it different or something.

so here’s a start to conquering this and finding a solution for ourselves.

julie/s, julies, Julies