Plan "B"

"Closure"

I almost deleted my old blog tonight. My "other" blog that is. The blog I kept until 2004. I'd since forgotten the password and no longer had the email account that it was linked to. So, after finding it earlier this week I decided that I really should do something about it. Through hook or crook, I regained access to the blog and almost deleted it. I had my finger on the trigger, but stopped short.

Instead, I started reading it. I started it the week I got divorced and stopped updating it about two years later. I really spilled my guts there, but not in a way that anyone should read about. The best term I can think of is "raw". There were no holds barred, and I really let it rip on many ocassions. It didn't matter if I was right or wrong - it was how I felt at the time.

In one respect, it was healthy to blog my feelings. It was therapeutic. Like two years worth of spilling my guts to a shrink, but it didn't cost $100 per hour. I was able to get a lot of things of my chest and expose them to the outside world. And it really didn't matter that the outside world was full of strangers. It was enough for me to know that another human being saw the pain in the words and possibly felt something because of it.

I exposed EVERYTHING in that blog as I re-read through it. There were no secrets and I'm sure that exposing some of these things to people I know would cause a lot of pain. I'm pretty sure that people would be devastated if their names were attached to some of my entries. But these were facts that had affected my life, and I couldn't hold them in any longer.

Fast forward 2-3 years (which really doesn't sound like that long now that I read that small integer). I've decided that I'm over all that and I've moved on. I made an effort to get access to that old blog that has been out there since 2002. I'm a different person now - people *DO* change, despite my earlier claim. And I was ready to delete that person and their thoughts since I was no longer that person.

Then I recall the wise words of someone. "Never throw away your love letters. They may be all you have when you grow old." I don't know who said that, and I may not understand what they meant now, but I keep all my old love letters. So, I thought that I might want to keep at least part of this blog. I went through and deleted those entries that could be traced back to people I know and cause disturbances. Then I went back through again and deleted those entries which were either inconsequential or trivial. Then, I went through again and pulled out individual entries that were either redundant in feeling or too deep for anyone to understand.

I also deleted some of the "pity party" entries, but not all of them. I think it's important for me to remember that I was pretty pathetic at one point in my life. It will keep me soft when I'm old.

What's left is (in my opinion) a pretty accurate representation of who I was during 2002-2004. But I'm not ready to share it with the world yet. My goal is to be completely transparent, but I'd need to make sure that the Internet caching won't bring up any of my deleted entries. Too many people would be hurt if they knew what others did.

O.K. I'm being mystic now - sorry.

In short, let me say this. It's important to know who you were. It helps you understand who you are; and where you're going. Keep a journal and re-read it years later to see if you like where you're going. Or if you're going anywhere. And if you're not going anywhere - why are you in this trip?