so who’s feeling thinky?

I feel a strong pull toward blogging today, but I’m not really sure what it is I need to write about. Obviously, I need to write about something, because it’s rare lately that I get these itches to write. But what? That answer is not immediately apparent. I’m hoping that just typing for a bit will help get it out.

I hate that I don’t write here much anymore. There are plenty of things going on, but I don’t know, I used to think my life was more interesting and less private, and these days I sort of feel like it’s less interesting and more private – or should be. So I close doors on a lot of subjects and it leaves me with precious little to talk about. I’m worrying too much about what people will think. I’ve crossed into a place where the majority of my readers are probably people who actually know me, as opposed to the early days of loriestories when most of my readers were faceless webpeople.

You know what the most popular post on this site is, according to my stats? It’s this one I wrote in 2004 about how much middle school sucks. And it’s not like there’s any profound advice in it or anything. It’s just that people seem to search for “middle school sucks” a lot in Google and then they come to that post and leave comments. I let most of them stay there even if they’re angry. It just seems like the thing to do. I go and read them sometimes and it gives me an interesting perspective on things.

So I’m a grownup now, whatever that means. One of the things it means is that people don’t usually make fun of me to my face anymore. But there’s this insidious thing that starts in high school and never really goes away where people – usually girls, in my experience – begin to make value judgments about The Kind of Person You Are based on what they know or see about you. I am guilty of this too. And the ones who talk the most about how nonjudgy they are sometimes turn out to be the judgiest of all.

Maybe you see the qualities that define me and add them to your experience to determine the Kind of Person I Am. You see that I am soft. I am pliant. I am nurturing. I am sensitive. I am open. I am genuine. And maybe your life experience leads you to conclude that these things mean I am weak. I am lacking independence. I am fragile. I am naive. You probably don’t mean any harm when you come to those conclusions; in fact, you probably compare them to your own self-image and think, “Thank God I’m not like that.”

But know this: I CHOOSE to bend. I am unbreakable.