Dear Readers,

I’m going to take a break from this.  I don’t have a single cause which I feel very passionate about and which is enough to motivate me to write.  I am interested by lots of things, and enjoy writing about them to push my ideas forward, but it seems, somehow, arrogant (in the absence of a cause) to even imagine that anyone might be interested in reading about what I think, unless they were a clone of me. 

This is emphatically not a reflection on those blogs that I read, because I enjoy reading them enormously, and commenting on them too.  I feel uncomfortable, however, with the pressure of an audience, even though I know some of the audience very well.  I do not want to write for the audience – I’ve fought hard to develop a more internal locus of control – but neither can I avoid (over) thinking about the possible audience.  Often it feels as if I am just tossing a precious thought into a dark chasm of nothingness:  I’d rather chew on it myself.  Often I feel the pressure of having to write something to satisfy expectations because the truth is that you are all only here for so long as I write things to read, and I do not like that pressure.  Often I feel my writing becomes awkward and clumsy and heavy and, ultimately, inauthentic. 

I am also more constrained than I had imagined by the position I occupy in local government – I’m the appointed independent chair of a committee responsible for promoting and maintaining good governance and high ethical standards of behaviour.  This constraint has rather surprised me, but the constraint is there all the same. 

Flooding this blog with a rapid fire of posts is typical of me and, I know, difficult for everyone else to keep up with.  I tend to express my anxiety by overfunctioning.  Typical of an older sister.  I do not want to hide behind duplicitous anonymity and want to be able to stand up and be counted for everything I write.  But I do not want to shout “Look at me”.

I’d rather have a real conversation about things, being honest.

I’m going away to see a friend in Holland next weekend and have given myself until I get back to think about what I want to do with this blog.

Thank you for reading, everyone.

Margaret

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