'cause it takes something more this time than sweet, sweet lies

I'm done with the song game - while I appreciate the suggestion for #22, I'd never heard the song myself, and so couldn't use it. I'm sure I could have come up with something if I'd thought long enough, but to be honest it's beginning to feel a little bit restrictive, and it was going to come to an end soon anyway. Farewell, song game! Of course, I'll still use lyrics as titles all the time, but I will no longer be held to a strict numerical pattern.

I had class tonight, and it was rather heartbreaking--it was the last one, which brings with it that whole, weird, 'I-will-never-see-these-people-again' feeling. You never know what the future holds, so I may see them (particularly in other classes), but it's doubtful. This class was strange because it encouraged a certain amount of almost unnatural sharing of emotions and vignettes from each others' lives with a group of complete strangers. The fact that this was a class, with a set of people who were committed to discussing the stories but were not committed to forming a bond outside of class, was in some ways very freeing--and in some ways very depressing, because I would like to continue this dynamic but know that it's not meant to be.

The class tonight was also heartbreaking because several of the stories dealt with relationships, particularly depressing and/or dysfunctional relationships, and it brought to mind all sorts of memories and experiences that I would just as soon forget. But that raises the interesting question of whether you really would prefer to 'just forget' something. Everything that happens in the past, good or bad, contributes to one's sense of self and to all the choices that come after, and so if I were to forget certain things, I would essentially have to sacrifice months/years of my life, and I would be a v., v. different person. Of course, maybe I wouldn't be a different person; maybe by the time some of these relationships happened, I was already so far along the path to personhood that I would have ended up in a similar situation even if it wasn't with the same individual(s).

Then, I get into the question of who exactly I'm writing this blog for. I'm not exactly writing it for myself--while it serves as a great record of what I've done, and I'm so glad that I have extensive posts from my India and Ireland trips, I don't feel quite free to share everything I'm thinking about. I also don't know if it would be a good idea to share everything; to quote Billy Joel (probably thrilling half my family), 'we all have a face that we hide away forever'. My hidden face manifests itself more in my written journal, but it would feel strange and extremely discomforting to share absolutely everything here.

So if not for myself, then for whom? In many ways, I write to let people know that I'm still alive, even though there shouldn't really be concern that I'm not. I also write to maintain contact with family and friends. However, there's an inherent unfairness with this; most of my family/friends don't blog with any frequency, and so regular readers know the minutiae of my life while I sometimes have very little idea of even the bigger aspects of theirs. Also, the blog can give a distorted sense of what's going on with me--I've learned some harsh lessons about openness, and so while I blog about what I *do* with others, I don't blog about how I *feel* about them. Since I don't blog about my feelings towards others, or about my job and colleagues, or about my opinions about politics/religion, this really does turn into a sort of narcissistic rambling about what I eat, where I go, who I see, and occasionally what's currently troubling me (without revealing too much detail). There is still value in having a blog, I think; even if I'm being opaque, writing things here can help me to clarify my feelings, and it keeps me in touch with the idea of writing things down even when I don't have time to write extensively in my journal.

I think that I need to remind myself sometimes that I'm only 25 and that I haven't necessarily gotten to know myself yet. I think part of the problem is that I have thought of myself as mature/grownup/adult since I was about ten, or possibly even earlier; I can't really remember thinking of myself as a child, even if I knew that technically I was. Granted, I'm more mature now than I was when I was ten--but I've always felt the need to control my emotions, take care of others, and behave in a rational manner (even if my thoughts and imagination are highly irrational). Despite the fact that I can't really remember feeling like a kid, I still haven't had quite enough life experience to be fully grown into myself. I'm interested in taking some time to devote solely to writing because I think it will help me to learn who I am, and to explore (and hopefully move past) some of the things that I've gone through and now have just enough distance from to start examining again. But the person I am now almost certainly will not be the person I am ten years from now, and even then I probably won't be completely convinced of who I am.

Anyway, I'm going to write in my journal awhile before going to bed. I meant to be done with this ages ago, but of course when I logged in to write, I discovered that I was finally allowed to switch to Blogger Beta, which I've been looking forward to for awhile, and so I played around with the template a bit. You probably won't notice any real changes, but I do like the labeling/categorizing feature, so hopefully I'll put that to good use in the future. Now, it's time for bed!