Anniversaries--Part Deux

Have you ever planned a party and no one showed up? A month ago, I “celebrated” the ninth anniversary of this, my little blog. I can’t say no one showed up… But the silence from most of my former crowd of blog friends was deafening. And depressing.


Two years ago, when I first posted about my decision to close the restaurant, I mentioned that I probably would not have the blog community to return to once all the loose ends were tied up with the café and I was a free—and somewhat needy—woman. Things in my corner of the Land of Blog had changed so much already by 2010. I knew that I would soon be spending more time there, but I also knew it would not be as if I had never left. Time and technology had marched on. Other, less intense forms of social media appeared; most of the blog community I had known migrated to Facebook, never to return.

I am Facebook “friends” with many of the folks I met online through “Coming to Terms…”. I keep up with them; I interact with them on a chummy level. It’s nice. It’s fine. But it is not the complex communication in which I positively reveled back in the hey-day of my blog. The early days of AOL J-land provided me with a kind of friendship which I had craved—and never known—my whole life. Of course, it didn’t, really. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? This whole world, these “friendships,” don’t really exist, do they?

This is NOT yet another “swan song” post. (How many of those have I written over the years? Three? Half a dozen?) Every time I would feel ignored or hurt, I would write a farewell post and go away for awhile. It seems silly, now. Who did I think I was hurting by quitting the community? Quitting the community is no longer an option, for it has quit me.

I’ve never been any good at “rites of passage.” It seems like I just get comfortable with a place or a thing, and it goes away. I’m always the last to leave, because I don’t really want to go, and I can’t catch a vision for what I’m supposed to go on TO. This place is little more than a virtual empty schoolhouse, now; still, I continue to haunt the halls. Mostly alone…back inside my head, where it all began.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I had been beset by this almost constant need to get away since we had closed the café. I theorized that this was because the Universe wanted me to distill my life to a few essentials in order for me to be able to hear its message. This may be true, still.

But a different explanation for this dawned on me the other day: I am alone. And that’s okay…I can deal with it. Maybe it’s what I need to be right now. But it’s really hard to BE alone surrounded by other people who don’t offer what I need, but have a great many expectations of me. Time was, I could escape to a virtual place where there were people who “saw” me as something different—more special, maybe—than those in my real life. But that place no longer exists.

Now, I have to find a new direction. Somewhere else I can go to heal…to help sort myself out and try to make sense again. So I’ve been feeling that I really need to go away alone. Where the solitude of my life is in harmony with my surroundings. It’s becoming so hard, so frustrating, to be WHO I am, WHERE I am. I know I have more to give, more to BE, but I can’t seem to find where to do it.

Funny…now that I think about it, I actually DO have a place to come to be alone, don’t I? I suppose I should enjoy this virtual solitude for now. Until I can figure out how to get the physical solitude I need…