There are odd things we do for the sake of other people, and there are then things we do that make possible for us to cope with that. It may not sound like any sense of purgatory to sit around a pool mostly naked with a bunch of possibly very pleasant strangers, also mostly naked, in a your tropical country of choice, but it feels like it to me. Well, not hell exactly, there would be no moral imperative imaginable if hell were like this, if you believe in a concept of hell to start with, for it is the most comfy chair like of all places I've been to. Probably that's why I feel uncomfortable. Is there no pleasing people like me? Probably not.
I am assuaging the odd thing by talking to myself online. That, I find pleasurable. I have no idea really why, except that as the lyrics to that song that I can't remember exactly, but it's a lovely wistful 80s ballad about telling your secrets to a stranger, not your friend. I'm supposing that all of us who blog are somewhat the same in this urge and it reminds me of an artwork I found, over six years ago now, in Stockholm, when I was working there and met the partner who I am now with, love very much and am now attempting to gracefully suffer for, and probably failing. It was a voice pipe, a sort of drain with a glamorous shower attachment (I'm not doing it justice - it was prettier than that) on the quay alongside the artist's invitation to tell your secret to the water - the great lake that Stockholm sits on. And I told it my secret - no longer a secret - that a colleague was making my life a misery, and felt a weight lift. All the guilt and confusion I felt didn't float away on the water exactly, but they shifted to somewhere I could deal with them.
So I think there is some value in talking to myself online, and in making it public. It is important to recognise the not so beautiful feelings and to not be 'fine'. There are things you can't tell a friend, because sometimes the friend is the problem, and because you are their friend you can't tell them that, you just suffer a little for them instead. My boyfriend is still getting his holiday, and this is the way I can help him have a not so miserable girlfriend. It is sort of working as long as he leaves me to it. Poor lad.
Very true. Much easier to tell your inner thoughts to a blank internet page than a falling face. Problem occurs when the people you are talking about stumble on the internet page and then get angry at what you've said or, worse, demand to know why you didn't tell them to their face. I see it as free therapy.
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