May 25, 2008

• How Blogging has Changed my Life

  Challenge #2008-10 from Kween_of_the_Queens is going to be my first essay for this blogring.  The theme is:

  A Look Back
  How has your outlook or life changed since you started your blog?

  It was suggested that we go back through our entries for May of the year we started on Xanga, but I don’t have to do that because it is all fresh in my mind.  I have been looking at and thinking about some of those entries already this month as I celebrated my Xangaversary, completed my “Golden Spike” memoir episode, and did a lot of editing in that column of memoir links on my main page.  May of 2002 was my first month on Xanga, my first blogging experience.  The journal was originally intended to help me deal with health issues, particularly food addictions.

  My first entry revealed that I was viewing the then-current sugar binge as an extinction burst, the little flurry of intense activity that often immediately precedes the end of some behavior.  I said then that I wondered if I had been digging my grave with a fork and spoon.  The blog did help me get a handle on my addictions, and with the added help of nutritional supplements, I was sugar-free and gluten-free for several years.  I relapsed, but I don’t think I could ever slip back so far that I’d be where I was when I started this journal.  Putting my lapses and relapses out here for all to see gives me added incentive to get my act together.

  The most outstandingly obvious change in my outlook involves ArmsMerchant, the man I call my Old Fart, my soulmate, spouse, and partner in crime.  Six years ago, there was a lot of dissension in my marriage.  Back then, the man was in active addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and a range of other drugs, both illicit and prescription. 

  He could have served as the poster boy for narcissistic personality disorder.  He lied (to himself and everyone else), he stole from my son and me, verbally abused us, tried (and failed so fully it’s funny) to keep his drinking secret, and went through all the grandiosity, ingratiation and rage that characterize NPD.  I mentioned some of his behavior in my blog, and I reported my feelings about it.  I referred to him by some words that probably are not polite enough for this blogring.

  Then, five years ago this past Friday, he quit the alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, and (wonder of wonders!) he then diagnosed his own NPD and started working to transcend it, with my therapeutic assistance.   He had help from the same kind of supplements that had helped me kick my food addictions, and still to this day he says that being clean is easier than getting loaded.  From our perspective (my son’s and mine), life with Greyfox is a whole different experience without the NPD and drugs.  I just giggled aloud as I wrote that.  My man is a wonder, a sweetie, and my hero.

  When I started this journal, people had been telling me for years that I should write the story of my life.  The comments from a few Xangans who read the first of my little stories in May of 2002 impelled me to start that project.  This month, I wrote the episode that tied my childhood segments into the 1960s segment that started it all.   Would I ever have sat down to a typewriter alone and gotten this far on my memoir?  I don’t think so.  I get massive encouragement to continue from Xangans who either identify with my younger self or complain about the cliffhangers.

  I might not even currently have a computer if it were not for this blog.  The cheap computer that we bought around the turn of the millennium when we moved in here on the electrical grid, after living for fifteen years off the grid, went through a series of hard drive crashes a few years ago.  We didn’t have the money to replace it, and the repairs that we were charging to our credit card were adding up to a lot of debt.  My son, Doug, and I were making ourselves nuts discussing whether we should get it fixed again or try to find a better used one that wouldn’t max out our credit.  I blogged from a library computer about our dilemma, and the dilemma was solved.

  One of the Xangans who had identified with my childhood memoirs, rosabelle, had her roommate put together a computer for us out of used parts that they had on hand.  We were without a computer for fifteen weeks, during which I did all my blogging from the library.  The postal service damaged the computer in shipment, paid off eventually on the insurance, and our local techies salvaged what they could, replaced what they couldn’t salvage, assembled a computer for us that is faster, with more memory than the old one, trouble-free for years now, and there was enough of the insurance settlement left over to buy a new printer/scanner/copier.  That, to me, reveals the power of blogging.

  I’m the same person I was six years ago when I started this, only more so.  One of my early entries was about my philosophy of life.  One internal difference I see in me between then and now is that I have transcended a lot of the beliefs I was working on at the time.   I have learned some things.  For example, my triple respiratory whammy last fall, catching a cold on top of the flu that came just as I was starting to recover from pneumonia, taught me that my body has some strong primal instincts for survival that go way beyond my conscious mind and emotional motivations.  When I was ready to lie down and die, my diaphragm kept struggling for breath.  Go figure.

  Another huge change in my life since I started blogging has come as a direct result of blogging.  I have more friends than I ever had before.  New ones come into my life all the time.  In the past week, I became acquainted with a few new people I found through other friends’ blogs, and one new friend found me when Google directed her to one of my old posts here.  All the changes I can recognize and identify here are gains.  If there have been any losses, I am not aware of them.

  [edit] …oh, wait a minute.  Now that I think of it, my memory isn’t working as well as it used to.  Maybe that’s why for a while there I couldn’t remember that I’m losing my memory.  I should probably get the rest of the memoirs written fast, before it is all gone.
  

  

  • 6:09 pm
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