Well, hello. Here we find ourselves again. How odd, given my blogging track record, but
anyway…
I thought I might take a stab at capturing the impact I’ve felt regarding
my last post. If you haven’t read it yet, doing so would make this here a fair bit easier to follow (but no guarantees on it being
actually easy to follow because, well,
ME.)
So
this post of which I speak, it’s the one where, prior to posting, inside me a prize fight had been waged: with near-terror in the face of rejection and awkwardness in one corner and the incredibly simple desire to just say, to express a thing because it mattered to me in the other. (The latter abetted, to a degree, by an increased swirling within me as I age of what some might call steadily upward levels of confidence. I, however, call it simply as I know it to be: just giving incrementally less of a shit about others’ potential perceptions).
With the many articles, posts and general commentary about Bell Let’s Talk Day that were positive I saw also some of the negative variety. There are those who feel it’s misguided, not as effective as it could or should be. Those who just want it to
be more.
I am not interested in debating this, but to me it is a not-too-distant leap to have to consider: Did I do a wrong, or at least less-than-best, thing in sitting down by myself, writing a bunch of words, and then pushing it out to you all, leaving you to, by the very nature of the process, have to be the ones to reach out to connect?
Maybe…?
I suppose the fact it comes down to is this: potential criticisms of process on my personal blog post are actually of no concern to me. I shared about me with a relatively simple and important sense of purpose.
What drove the post was a desire to allow others to see that there can be so much to a person that is them, yet unseen – and an even stronger desire to hopefully allow others a small chance to hear that something they experience may not be theirs to go through alone. That someone else knows intimately a small thing about a small piece of what they know and feel and experience – and, possibly, hide.
What is of great – borne straight from my heart – concern to me are the people who read the post and identified with any piece of it. I hold dearly those who wrote to me or spoke to me in person, sometimes in tears.
I am so honoured by those who have let me know that this, in some way, formed a connection between us that may not have otherwise been there, whether it was because they felt a reflection of their world somehow or because it let them into my (often guarded, so I hear) world a little more – or both. In different ways, with different people there was in this a tender shoring up of a beautiful mix between us of understanding, of validation, of support.
In the days after I published my post, I experienced more extended pauses, more long-held emotionally charged gazes with others than I ever have in such a short time in my life. This effect could, in the moment, knock me a bit off-kilter – the intensity of it. Add to that the fact that I am very often awkward even on a good, even-keeled day…and, well, to those for whom I may have inadvertently ruined the whole moment:
SORRY.
Regardless, what passed between us in those moments varied. There may have been tears, smiles, nods, a few short sentences or even just the potential of words that had no need to be said, both because of the power of the unspoken and also because deciding to fully go there in an open office setting or on the sidewalk – the kinds of places where these moments truly did occur – just might not have felt like the right way to go about. Not yet.
And so this concludes my brief musings on a thing, not knowing what I’ve started and having no conception of what an end might be.
Just sayin', is all.
Comments