Torill has more insight in my own hiding in writing mechanisms than I do myself:
Mark likes the point that blogs do not reveal all, and notes that
And yesterday it was exactly a year since Lisbeth’s mother died. She writes that grief and change affect everything in your life, and yet we acknowledge them less than happiness: a wedding or a birth or a tax rebate. I agree. I’ve been leaning on my friends (who are wonderful) and discovering that almost everyone has survived a breakup or many, and their stories are wonderful comforts. After all, if they became happy again, then so will I.
I had two miscarriages before I had my daughter, and another afterwards for that matter. Miscarriages are even more taboo in polite conversation than are breakups. When I lost my first baby I thought noone I knew had ever been in the same situation. Of course, when I began to tell people, stories came out everywhere, stories of old grief were brought out like small treasures wrapped in lace and carefully kept in a scented but rarely opened chest. These women (mothers of friends, friends of friends) showed me I was not alone. And that helped me so much.
Now I rarely think of my miscarriages, but I remember the grief, far greater than my rational expectations of appropriate mourning for a life barely begun. And I remember I promised myself not to be silent, because silence hurts far more than speech.
Why shouldn’t we speak of grief, breakups and miscarriages as we speak of joy?
Related
Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
vika
Because, too often, grief prompts precisely the reactions one doesn’t want to hear – you wrote about this in a later post.
Or, due to some social norms I’ve no idea about, public expression of grief may be perceived as a Cry For Attention.
I’ve written publicly about my father’s death, but refrain most of the time, for the above reasons. Aha, but here is a *great* use for the disable-comments feature.
(But then, if one disables comments, why blog? – my brain asks. And so forth in a circle.)
jill
I deleted a trackback to my post about my partner leaving me. It’s not exactly that I don’t want trackbacks to it but I guess I’m – oh I don’t know. I just didn’t want that trackback.
Kind of like when one of my nosier friends, having heard about my breakup, rang only so she could hear the gossip. No “how are you?”, only “So what happened? I bet he was cheating on you! (no, btw, that’s not it) Tell me how he broke up!” I hung up on her and would have deleted any phoned-in trackbacks.
beta blog
blogs and mediation
i try to read Jill Walker’s blog now and then – jill looks at blogging in an interesting academic and cultural context. there’s on jill’s blog which makes a point that deserves some comments: Blogging is about hiding. It’s about…