Home Alone 2

I'd like to take this opportunity to assure you that my parent's don't abandon me on a regular basis.


However, tonight I am (at least temporarily) home alone again.


And, after re-connecting with an e-pen pal, I began to wonder what happened to my previous attempts at blogging. I used to write lots. I had a blog on my MySpace page (does anyone still use myspace for anything?) and I had an anonymous LiveJournal for a while.


I've had this niggling feeling that I'm not really writing what I want to write here on my blog.  Mostly that's due to my vagueness about what I want this blog to be. I cannot help but compare it to my other blogs which were much more... candid, I suppose. One important aspect of those blogs was that I was at a stage in my life where I had a lot of confusing stuff to work through, and blogging helped me sort out my head in many ways. 


I'm less confused now, but I'm sure once I do run into an issue it'll be weaved into a post somehow. That's my usual way of working through things: writing them down. It forces me to put things in order and be clear about what I really think or feel. Coming from a childhood that left me with little self esteem, I've always had difficulty expressing myself verbally. I've put in a lot of conscious effort over the years to work on that and speak up about how I feel, but when things get confrontational or when something is really important to me, I tend to get very quiet. 


That's where writing comes in. It's a way that I can be clear and firm about what I think, what I want, what I need. In writing I can be persuasive, I can be funny, I can be forceful. I can be all the best parts of me without the awkward aspects, like my propensity to turn beetroot-coloured. 


Trouble is, the times I really turn to writing are the times when I am upset, depressed, angry, scared or lonely. Which means, without these negative (positive?) stimuli, I don't have much to say. Being blissfully happy doesn't make for much deeply incisive thought-provoking analysis. Mostly we're too blissed out to think twice about it.


So sadness, then, is the food of my introspectives. And it is sadness that people most often need to share. One of my lecturers today almost broke down at the end of her presentation when she disclosed to us her hopes and fears for her mother's impending death. Not a word was said by my classmates but we could all feel a wave of sympathy and support go out to her. A young girl I've gotten to know over the past semester is tragically heartbroken after being left by her first love. All my optimistic attempts to explain that 'love will come when she least expects' (how I hated hearing that when I was recently single!) and that 'when it's The One, you just know' were batted aside by her very definite decision that she would live and die alone because she'd never be able to trust any man ever again. She's 19.


When we are hurting we need to tell others of our pain. and we don't necessarily want to hear back that it's all going to be fine. Sometimes we just want to moan.


I moaned a lot in my old blog posts. But that moaning led me to some of the more important realisations of my change to adulthood. I'm still a work in progress, but I understand many more things about myself now. I've learnt that I'm terrified of failure. i've learnt that I still care way too much about what others think of me. I've learnt that I need affection and approval... quite regularly.


I've learnt that I am an ordinary woman, full of fears and misgivings, lacking confidence, worried about her body. Blessed beyond measure with a happy loving family, and a small but tight-knit bunch of friends. I've learnt that I can be a good employee and that I am capable of learning well, once I overcome my fears of failure.


I'm still learning my flaws (and I certainly won't enumerate them all here), and I can begin working on them to make myself a stronger person.


And if my parents keep insisting on leaving me home alone, the first thing I'll have to work on is being afraid of the dark.