a warped view

Last Friday I made someone cry. She is a friend of mine, I've known her for over half my life, my children call her Aunty, I love her dearly. I didn't set out to make her cry and I'm not proud of it. I'm sorry that I upset her. I'm not sorry about the reason I made her cry.  We nearly always have drinks and nibbles with my mum on Friday nights. We have a regular cast of friends that join us when they can and last Friday a group of about 8 of us were gathered. It was a normal  Friday night, drinking, laughing, eating, talking. One friend (not the one I made cry) has been having a terrible time of late with all sorts of unpleasantness in her life. She's been quite down and I would suspect is suffering from depression. She made a half hearted "joke" about walking to work the other day and getting caught waiting for the train to pass at the train crossing and declared that for a moment she'd thought to herself that if she threw herself under the train ...

When you look at me do you see a girl who is rude, unapproachable, snobbish? Who thinks she's too good for everyone else? Do you see a mum who just drops her kids at school and runs away because she doesn't want to be involved? Or do you see that I am afraid and anxious. That I try and avoid social interaction because I don't know what to say, because I'm convinced no one will like me. Do you see the scared little girl who was bullied so badly she didn't want to go to school, the scared little girl who was called names and teased and picked on, who had her things stolen and destroyed, who spent more time hiding in the nurses office than she did in class? Do you see the lonely girl who had no friends to call her own? Do you see the desperate girl who sat in her mother's car and begged not to be sent to school, with tears streaming down her face and sobs choking her words? Do you see the woman who still becomes that scared child when she enters a school. Do you ...

How much mental illness can people take? How many posts on a blog? How many text messages asking for help, for comfort, for reassurance? How many sob filled phone calls? How many times can you show up with a tear stained face with nothing to offer but melancholy and pain? How many times can you cancel at the last minute because you realise you can't bring yourself to leave the house before people stop asking you places? How much depression can you show people before they stop trying to be sympathetic and get fed up with the drama? Every time I want to tweet that I'm not doing ok, or post on Facebook that I'm not coping, or write a blog post about the darkness I worry about people's limits. I worry that I'm THAT whiner who just goes on and on about depression all the time. Who never has anything good to say. Who brings everyone down with her constant downers. I wonder how many eyes will roll. How many will want to unfollow or unfriend me. How many will try and offe...

Its been such a long time since I've blogged properly and I'm always reading articles by other bloggers about how to be better at blogging. The majority of them talk about knowing who you're writing for, being clear about your audience. That got me thinking, who do I write this blog for? And I realised something. Even though I love it when people comment on the blog or on twitter or Facebook, I enjoy knowing that people read what I write, I really write this blog for me. I had become hung up on who was reading what I wrote, what they thought about my posts, what they thought of me. I had lost myself to the idea of appearances and what others thought. That was never meant to be what this blog was. So here's the deal; if you are reading this I appreciate your time, that you care enough to read what I write. But I will no longer be worrying about what you think of my blog, whether you are sick of hearing about my depression, sick of my "whinging". This blog is ...