Comments

Note:  This post is a result of two very nice people I do not know at all, Grace and Hayden. I assume since they both left comments it is okay to mention names.  If not, please let me apologize and ask you both to forgive me.  But if you keep reading, I hope you’ll see this blog is, in reality, a testimony to people like yourselves.  

Okay.  I’m afraid.  I admit it.  I’m afraid of comments.  But not at all for the reason you might think. Let me try and explain.  But, as with all things emotional, it might be difficult to make others understand.  And to attempt to share and make others understand something I, myself, do not understand in any way?  How do I do that?  I’m absolutely clueless, but here goes.

Remember my second blog post, “Yearning”?  I explained that my blog is the record of a personal journey.  A journey to figure out what seems to me a Twilight Zone-like world.  (Actually, at times I think the Twilight Zone would be easier to understand.)   I said that comments would not help me at this point in time.  I really thought that was true.  And, maybe to a certain degree, I still feel that way.  Because since starting the blog I have found I feel so much better after I have written something.  It is helping me.  I’m finding it therapeutic.  I don’t want that spoiled.  I need it. 

But here’s another reason for wanting to avoid comments.  I’m afraid that what I feel about individual people might be shattered.  And I desperately do not want that!  People could not have been more considerate, more compassionate, more loving than what we experienced.  They were everything good we humans can be.  It’s amazing.  It doesn’t matter that people couldn’t take our pain away.  Or even lessen it.  But, there is something about knowing people care and they would do so, if at all possible.  I don’t understand it.  I just know it is a truth. 

Although I am naïve, I do know there are hate-filled voices out there.  A lot of them.  But, I don’t experience them individually.  I hear them often (not always) as the collective voice of various groups, organizations, etc.  In fact, that is part of what is so confusing to me now.  How is it that the sum of a number of individual voices can bear no resemblance to the voices on their own?   I don’t get that.

So, to hear a number of individual voices that are different from what we experienced would bother me tremendously.  I don’t know if I have the emotional energy to remind myself that several voices make the extreme exception.   I want to be able to defend the individual voices I’ve experienced for as long as I live.  Truly.

But... (There’s always that “but”, isn’t there?)   Not knowing what I am doing, I must have inadvertently allowed comments at some point in time.  And I received two comments, from two people whose individual voices were exactly what we experienced.   They were open, honest, encouraging, uplifting.  And that makes me more afraid.  Now I don’t want their voices sullied by any nasty ones. 

Here’s what’s happened.  Saturday night when I couldn’t sleep I kept thinking that I wanted to at least write one post and thank those two people.  I appreciated them and wanted them to know that.   I was seriously considering that possibility.  When I checked my email on Sunday my brother had sent me a message to allow comments; that I was missing out on some wonderful online friendships.  The conclusion I thought I was arriving at was echoed by his assertion.     

And here’s what I’ve decided.  How about I move slowly and cautiously?  (I did, right up front, admit to being a wimp, in “Yearning”.)  I’m going to take Grace’s suggestion and sometimes allow comments.  I know someone can then comment on any blog post whatsoever.  But it might be easier if I only occasionally have to think about anything negative.  And hopefully if anyone gets nasty it will be easily offset by some new online friendships.  I think my brother might be right about that.  (Wow, hate to have to put that in writing!  He’ll never let me forget it!!  But, you know what?  I think people like Grace and Hayden are going to be worth it!)