Careful thought

Careful thought, today and in the coming days, about the content on this blog. 

There is a dilemma in it for me. Whether to preserve the accurate record of what was, and will always remain fixed in my mind, as a horrendous collection of experiences laid over the top of each other in one continuously awful period that lasted several years. Or whether to erase the fullness of my own cathartic expression of so many aspects of that, in order to preserve the blog's original intent and tone, as it was originally known by the few of my readers who know me or know my online writing. 

But there needs to be some acknowledgement that part of the experience rested in the suppression of my fullest expression, by myself but also, maybe, by others who wished to avoid the inevitable confrontation with the awfulness of my reality, either because they had some part in it, or because they looked away when perhaps they could have been more attentive to the circumstances that were consuming me. Even in my hour of greatest need, believing myself to be heard, here and elsewhere, I was not, and there's a resonant damage in that with the silence of my abused childhood. That trauma, reawakened, deserved a voice, no less so than the trauma of my more recent experience. But it was not a kind voice, and there was all manner of blame and powerlessness and fury expressed here that was rightly so at the time, but which may not persist beyond the final bounds of the experience. 

So now, with a little time and distance from the worst of that onslaught, and soothed by a more benevolent-seeming turn in my circumstances, I must now decide how much of this written record to preserve, here or elsewhere. How much of that honours the truest nature of my experience, and how much of it might unnecessarily distress readers who come late to this written account, and who might be shocked to read for themselves that way I unravelled, at least for a time. There is no easy reading of genuine despair, and it was the very depths of such despair that I laid bare here. I am mindful of the hurt that reading such despair may cause people who care about me, and that is why I took the blog down when I did, over a year ago. But a year on, a year in which there have been some small, beneficial changes in my life, it no longer seems fair to deprive myself of the joy and consolation of this space. And more than that, I feel the need to reclaim the better parts of my life, the parts that were stripped away during the worst of those incomprehensible times. 

A balance, then, is what is needed here. Not to expunge the more torrid narratives, but maybe to preserve them in a bracketed way, so that I can refer to them without exposing my readership to the fullness of the worst of it. But you should not, if you're reading this, expect to find a nicely sanitised version of the events of the last few years. I may choose to soften some of my writing, but I will equally permit the boldest facts to remain so they can speak for themselves. You have a choice, whether you read it or you don't. I have applied careful thought to my decision to curate my blog in this way so that I can open it to readership again. You too can apply careful thought to understanding what is written here, and why I have written it.