letter to our readers (lyn)

I don’t write because I think my life is so exciting.  Nor do I think my life is particularly interesting.  In fact, I am probably more typical than not.  I write because I find it cathartic.

I have always written, though not publicly.  My diaries go back to before I was ten.  An exciting entry might be the number of convertibles I counted (on my way to Mattapan to visit my grandparents) vs. how many my sister counted.  I always lost.  Years later, my sister told me that she never even bothered counting.  Whatever my number was, she’d just add a few and that would be her number.  I never occurred to me that I was the only one playing the game.

So now I blog.  In the beginning, M and I had a specific purpose.  We would write about our journey to lose weight.  As expected, the blog became more expansive.  Once I reached my goal, and M stopped blogging, I started a new blog.  And when M said she wanted to write again, I abandoned my blog and joined up with her…so happy she’d returned to writing.

Before starting this blog, M and I had long discussions about blog honesty.  Not that what we write is dishonest, it’s what we don’t write.  We will never invade another’s privacy, nor will we expose feelings that could be hurtful to others.  These parameters often mean not writing about the very things that consume us. 

But I do feel an obligation to anyone willing to read this blog, to at least be honest about myself.  And so I may post things that I know are not flattering. 

I recently wrote about earrings I purchased.  The cost of the earrings was mostly covered by swapping jewelry I already owned but rarely wore.  I have since taken down the post because of a comment I got from a reader.  Like Romney’s 47% comment, I felt the reader judged me in a way that was unfair and overly harsh. It made me cry.

Maybe I’m not tough enough to be writing about anything too personal.