All posts for the month May, 2014

A young woman takes her pet lobster out for a walk.

Nothing to see here. Just taking my lobster for a walk.

Enjoy your Friday, and your weekend!!

You never really know someone …. and other snap judgements

Blogging is a funny old thing to do isn’t it?

You sit and write about your life, then have total strangers pop over and have a read.

Those total strangers leave comments, some times those comments are more “character building” than others.

And you meet those “strangers” — and in some cases you become friends, and in others you issue a restraining order.

I read other bloggers work – granted not as regularly as I used to.

I used to trawl around and discover bloggers. Then spend 4 – 6 hours reading their blogs from the first post to the last. It was like reading a novel, filled with happiness, heart ache, tears, joy, love and loss ….. quite beautiful to behold.

Bloggers and what they blog have changed my life significantly.

I have learnt so many life lessons through other people’s accounts of their lives. Of what they have shared. Of what they have been brave enough to put out there for me to read.

I have laughed and cried over people and their joy and pain, who I will never meet.

For those few hours, whilst I read their blogs, I felt an affinity, a closeness with them, that resonated with me somewhere in my heart, or soul, or brain.

The problem with blogs, is that you actually are given snap shots in to a blogger’s world or life. You do not actually know them.

Sure, you have an idea of who they are. Possibly you get a sense of how they may react if you threw cold water on them, but you do not really know them.

Blogging, like anything creative is sometimes about a persona that is created. Sometimes you write and it is with a particular slant, or a way of expressing yourself. But is not actually who you are. Not totally.

My blog gives glimpses of who I am.

I talk about how I feel at a particular time — it may be filled with emotion and raw honesty, because it is how I feel at that exact moment in time.

I have no issue with writing posts that I know I will disagree with in 10 days time. Or where in 6 months I may have a totally different view on that subject.

How I feel on a day, and how I am able to express that thought and emotion is dependent on many factors.

What I write here is not the everything of me. This is not a summary of who I am, this is not a “quick tool” to get to know me – a cheat sheet as it were.

To say that you know me absolutely based on the last four years of my writing, would be inaccurate. Hasty. Flawed.

I am glad – thrilled – that people read my blog.

Even though I have slowly become the world’s worst blogger — I am madly excited that people cheer me on when I have had a shit day or am going through a bit of a disaster. I often feel such a sense of joy when people send me private emails and leave messages on this blog.

In some cases people want to give me a hug when I am feeling bad —- I think as a reader, and even as a blogger, it is good to make the realization that reading someone’s blog, does not make you know them.

This blog is not my life — it is portions that I choose to share with you. But it is not the total sum of me.

I am all these things on this blog, and a thousand other things. In some cases I am more, in others I am less.

I share a great deal.

I write on my blog, to large degree, like I am in real life. There are parts of who I really am represented here, but there are many aspects to me that I keep to myself. Those parts I share with people who know me, who really know me. And parts I never share, because they are mine alone.

Please don’t think you know me just because you’ve read my blog.

13 Comments

by reluctantmom on May 23, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Blogs and Forums

Tagged Cape Town Blogger, Moms who Blog, Reluctant Mom, Reluctant Mom Blog

Posted by reluctantmom on May 23, 2014

https://reluctantmom.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/you-never-really-know-someone-and-other-snap-judgements/

Drunk dialling and other interesting stories ….

You know how you get people who talk in their sleep and people who walk in their sleep…

There are also people … or just one person …. who SMS’s in her sleep. That would appear to be me.

Drinking not necessary. It doesn’t help, but it is not necessary.

I have done it before, but usually it is harmless and usually just an SMS’s that make no sense because the spelling is so bad.

No harm done.

Except that once where I took photographs of Dexter (my boston terrier) and posted them on Facebook and told the entire world of social media who follow me —- which is about 12 people —- that I am going to marry Dexter. It was a very passionate Facebook status update, and I was feeling particularly close to him that day.

Back to last Thursday.

I was not drunk. I decided I needed an early night, and I went to sleep at 21h15. I recalled the time distinctly, as I looked at the time on my phone and thought, wow that is early, but dang I am so tired.

Then I went to sleep.

Then I woke up at 21h30 and proceeded to pick up my phone and merrily engage with the universe.

How did I know?

When I woke up on Thursday morning all bright and bushy tailed and glanced at my phone, there seemed to have been a lot of activity on my phone.

I was a bit perplexed by the amount of messages popping up, and also I could not understand that context.

I thought someone had died, or the sky was falling and Chicken Little had been right all along.

It took me a few moments of rubbing sleep out of my eyes, and trying to punch in my password to understand what all the fluffle was about ….. then I went to read the history of the messages, and realised …..

Er — what? Or as said WHAT THE FUCK!!! ….. WHAT THE FUCK??? ………..nooooooooooooooooooooooooo?

It was so bad, so very bad, and so …. just bad, that I first had to do an audit of how many people this affected. Fortunately the total count was two, which is far better than five or what ever it could have been.

Two is not a good number in itself, but it is better than a number say bigger than two.

Both people I did not know terribly well. Both people would not be people I would engage in this sort of banter with. And definitely not when I was fast a freaking sleep.

Can you spell “please let the earth swallow me up now, and the VODACOM network go first and take all these messages with them….”

I seldom use the term “mortified” but hell’s bells I was mortified.

I walked around last Thursday a very deep shade of cerise, and I spent what ever time I had trying to apologise and explain, and really try to extricate myself from the situation(s) that I had managed to create.

Of course when I read the messages “sleeping me” had written, I saw that they sort of started off sounding a bit like me, but the grammar, spelling and sentence structure was so bad, that there is just no way I would send an sms like that.

But short of telling people I had been kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to continue this bizarre cell phone discussion with them, there was nothing else further to do than apologise, apologise again, and then apologise the third time …. and for me to quietly just slink away.

Since Thursday, I realised that a really good tactic would be to toss my phone into the back of my cupboard, on my way to bed.

Ivedal it seems is to blame — it causes a bit of amnesia at a certain point. There is no guarantee that at that point your brain has told your body to lie down and stay down.

I have done a few other bizarre things in my I-thought-I-was-sleeping past, but this was the final straw. Got a new script, trying out something else to help me sleep, and maybe SMS a bit less.

More crazy I can’t do.

7 Comments

by reluctantmom on May 22, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Then it really went wrong

Tagged being really stupid, being stupid, ivedal, sleep walking, sleeping medication

Posted by reluctantmom on May 22, 2014

https://reluctantmom.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/drunk-dialling-and-other-interesting-stories/

Puts hand up and waves …..

I really have been unable to blog as of late.

There is just too much going on in my head to find the one thread of sense to put a blog post together.

Instead I have been journalling like a mad woman. Furious writing. Thoughts. Emotional vomiting. Stuff and things. Just trying to work it all through in my head.

It is more doodling with letters than actual journaling, but my crazed notes are everywhere. Random thoughts.

The post before last was a bit hectic – and I was really at what could easily be described as the lowest most painful place I have been to in quite some time.

I had my own concerns that I would not survive that day. That week.

I am still feeling a bit shaky, and a bit uncertain.

I get up every day, go to work, attempt at being productive and try to be sociable as much as I can. I try to give the impression that I am keeping my shit together — most days.

There are other days when I am feeling like I have got it together, and that I am better than okay. That I might be alright.

But those are only on some days.

I have decided to return to cognitive behaviour therapist I saw about two years ago.

As much as I love the therapy that has you lying on the couch talking about about my mother and having the other person go “uuuhhhmmm” and “yes, I hear you” and “and how did that make you feel?” I got so much benefit from working with Dr J previously.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is such a powerful tool.

It has helped me immensely in the past, to try to move out of “catastrophe thinking” – it’s the thinking that no matter what happens or occurs, you start to think the worst is going to happen, and plan accordingly.

Great for the end of the world, not so much for every day thinking.

I have found that I tend to ruminate with something negative.

It runs through my head over and over again. I relive the situation in every detail, over and over again. Then I beat myself up about it over and over again.

CBT definitely gives me the tools to realise that my thinking (in some instances) is faulty and gives me the method of how to change that thought process.

By changing the way I think or process information, changes the way I feel about something, and has a natural knock on to change the way I behave and and and ….. I am simplifying it, but you sort of get the idea.

Not quite “think you are happy and then you are happy” stuff – but it helps me to crawl out of the constant negative and bad feelings that often overcome me.

Kennith and I have worked through all the details that are “the divorce” and at this stage paperwork gets sent to a lawyer who prepares them and as we have finalised and agreed on the details, it means that it goes through as an “uncontested divorce” – so that should not require too much energy. And blood. And tears.

This is me telling you I am alive. I am okay.

I may not be 100% okay, but I am a little bit okay.

I have faith that I will heal. I will be more than okay one day – and each day I feel a bit stronger, and I can glimpses of the me who I will be.

Long road still to travel — no doubt there will be a few rolls back down the hill, but there we go. Moving forward. Baby steps.