It may not have escaped the notice of regular readers that my customary, two posts a week, blogging output has dried up somewhat over the last several months. In part, this is because I’ve been struggling to work out what I actually want this blog to be in my new life, or if it has a place in it at all.
I suspect this might not be 500 words of carefully chosen prose, with a smart intro, some hot spanky sex and a clever exit. It feels as though it might be a ramble. It could be 1,000 words or 5,000; but it’s likely to be me exploring where I am just now, wondering why I feel so stuck and lecturing myself about how to get unstuck. If you’re up for that, hang around; if it sounds like self-indulgent BS, and you’d rather see pictures of hot sex workers, then delve around in my back catalogue.
It’s all still there.
For now.
The truth is that 80% of what’s in my blog feels like the past; like something that happened; an extended vacation from which I have great …well, OK, really fucking amazing…. photo albums that I can flick through at my leisure.
I’m tremendously grateful for all those times: the wonderful people I met, the experiences, the things I learned, the way it allowed me to develop and understand myself; but I’m also conscious of other, more negative, more questioning feelings.
It really was an amazing period of my life: the hotness of the situations I found myself in; the intensity of the BDSM, the intimacy of the sex.
I experienced sensations and emotions so intense that they broke down the barriers of my reserve and flooded out in 300 or so blog posts. I found pleasure in discovering both my strength and my vulnerability and found, much to my suprise, that I was able to share them with other people. That led to sharing other things too: my food, my family, my life and, ultimately, led to the realisation that BibulousOne was no longer only a handy box I had made to store my kinks in, but that BibulousOne was me, really me, and that 95% of me was now here and on Twitter.
Finding myself in a wonderful new relationship, my immediate instinct was to write about that too, not realising at first how wrong that instinct was, how unfair. I’m ashamed to say that it took me a while to understand that my new love wouldn’t want to see the detail of what we had done together the night before broadcast over the internet. I cringe now to think of the posts I wrote, or of my initial disappointment when she said “Sorry, but no” to the suggestion I might publish them. I understand those boudaries better now and love that she has become more comfortable to see herself in these pages.
But I’ve increasingly found myself questioning what else is here from those earlier times: the hedonism; the wanton excess, the entitlement implied by a middle-aged man with a bit of spare cash, going out and taking what he wanted quite as often as I did. I find myself remembering the lies I told to support my self-indulgence, the way I buried myself in all this, hid in it really, rather than concentrate on rescuing what should have been the important things in my life. Not that it necessarily would have made any difference, but so many times I took the easy way out: Big problem at work? Go to Elita for a beating. Argument at home? Pay someone to take me to bed and kiss me. It was always easier than facing up to the reality.
The truth is I went there to celebrate the good times as well as to forget the bad. I went there when I had a kinky itch, when I had won a few bob at poker or when I had lost; before I went on holiday and after I returned; I went there because I was up, because I was down and when things were just so. I took any excuse and none to indulge myself. It’s hard to be comfortable with all that.
Which is not to say I want to bury myself in regret either.
These days, I try, helped by the counsellor I see once a week, to spend less time regretting the past and more time focussed on the present, on the people I am with, on the life I am leading. I had those wonderful experiences and they helped me get to the place I am now, but I find it hard to like some aspects of the person I was at that time. I’ve realised the way to respond to that is to be a better person now and, for me, that means to focus on the people who are close to me, to invest in those relationships and be fully present in them. I don’t always manage that.
My cycles of negativity aren’t done yet. I’ve experienced one in the last few weeks, and they’ll probably keep coming back for a while. The creativity of the act of writing, something unknown to me till I started blogging, has been really helpful in the past and I miss it. Perhaps I’ll archive some of the blog, rename it, change the way it looks and find other things to write about. Or perhaps I’ll start a new one.
I need to unstick various aspects of my life. My divorce, my house and my job have been mired in a viscous gloop that is, at least partially, of my own making, though I have recently made important decisions in each area. I’ve been telling myself that I’ll spend more time writing once those things sorted out, but perhaps creative sparks I generate here will bleed into those other things as they once did.
It’s worth a try.
I enjoyed reading your reflections here. I also do battle with the desire to reveal against the need to protect my loved one from having what is, after all, as much his business as it is mine. So I can appreciate that tightrope walk! Whatever way in which you choose to express yourself here, I will still be a very interested reader.
Yes, always a good read – its been fun, more power to your elbow! Very well done 🙂
Every damn thing you write is so powerful B~one.
You are a mesmerising Blogger. I hope you get comfortable with all that is your life, including this blog.
You’ve been generous to us readers. Your inner conflict so eloquently explored here.
X x x
Evolution is a good thing, and reflection is valuable. Not just to you, but to those who’ve been in your position, who have had similar experiences, who want to see how someone else has navigated it, and what happens next. Personal blogs are my absolute favourite because we get invested in the person writing, we travel with them, we see them and we see ourselves, we have hopes for them, we laugh and cry with them, and all of that has value.
For me, shared experiences help us to see our own humanity.
I’ve been writing my blog for a long time, and I’ve both made conscious decisions on changes of direction and I’ve also shifted simply because my life has changed. When my auto-tweet posts an old piece I always have a niggling worry that it’s pointing to something I’m appalled by now. I’m not that person any more. But she existed, her story is real and true, and still has value.
All that to say: Change as you will for your own sake and that of your partner and family, and if that means deleting, moving, something, then so be it. But the whole of your story, with its flaws and foibles, has worth, and I’d argue it has more now *because* you are changing. I, for one, am looking forward to where you go next.
Ferns
Thank you for sharing this and I sure hope you don’t disappear, but find a way to share that works for you and in your ‘new’ life 🙂
Rebel xox