SarahAnnAlien's Journal: Journal Problems #3

Well, this is going to be a short one... I spent a bunch of time tonight writing to people... cried and sent apologies to one person who misunderstood, sent an explanation to another person... got unfriended by someone I have a great deal of respect for... and sent out another explanation to someone in an entirely non-Slashdot context. Three email messages... three hours.

And yet I'm going to press on, as time permits, despite the fact that I may be doing damage faster than I can even try to fix it. Sigh.

I guess the take home lesson is, if you have an awkward issue that you yourself don't understand, and it involves other people, and you don't know how to deal with it... whatever you do, don't try to be honest about it and talk about it as openly as possible in a public forum. Instead, the best approach is to just bottle up your frustration and suffering, and carefully maintain a polite inoffensive facade to the other people involved.

But I'm not going to do that... either I talk about this and work through *my* issues with it, or I stop keeping this journal, because there's just no point if I can't talk about the things I need to talk about. It's useless if I feel so constrained that I can't express myself. It's also useless if I can't manage to talk through an issue without offending every single reader in some way or another, though. Sigh. This is my "Journal Problem".

If you, dear reader, are offended by any of this... I apologize. I don't want this to hurt anyone... but don't entirely know how to deal with the fact that I don't entirely control that. Also, if you find my opinions offensive, keep in mind that part of what I'm trying to do is figure out what I think! I'm trying to learn about myself, as well as the world and the environment I live in, and make sense of it all. I cannot apologize for that. I'll do the best I can not to hurt anyone's feelings in the process, but I have rather limited control over how other people feel about things, ok?

And since I'm out of time tonight, let me just offer these random words of wisdom about people offering assistance that have come to mind lately:

Oh hallelujah, our problems are solved. We have banana bread ... Banana bread? Sorry, sorry, it's just that we haven't slept in days, and we're running out of money and ... Banana bread? What the hell were you thinking? Banana bread. Apologize, apologize again. As a token of forgiveness, please take this baby.

It may be a couple days before i have time to address this issue again... real life intrudes sometimes.

And maybe I'll make banana bread this weekend too...