It's day 3 of my blogversary celebration and it's about time you had a sense of blogging past. I would do blogging future as well, but my predictive powers are on the blink. Instead I will do a meme that I was given a couple of weeks back and had completely forgotten about. Not yet, though. I will sneakily slip the meme in between other posts.
Over the next few days, I shall post posts from years gone by. I want to declaim, "You will laugh - you will cry." The probability is quite high that you will only cry. Read at your peril!
To get you started, here is one from my very first month of blogging.
26th May, 2005. 1:24 pm. Not sure about the value of epiphanies
Last night contained an important moment for me. It was born of an overactive brain and a touch of physical pain. It was also born of an invitation in the mail.
In just under three weeks I attend a farewell function for members of an advisory council. When that's done, I'll only have one policy committee left. I've been reconciling myself gradually to life without NGO stuff and without the frenzy of Women's History Month and without advisory roles. This is not a sudden decision. It's just a decision I didn’t care to face until now.
I care so intensely about fighting racism and about gender issues that it hurts to admit that my health limits me. I've already stepped back from a range of groups I've worked with in the past. In the process, I'm losing touch with some of the most amazing people you will ever meet. But I have to. There are other people who can run tight meetings, give a cogent briefing, give speeches, develop policy, train people. No-one else can take care of my health.
If I had kept on at the pace I set myself a while back, I would have followed my late mentor, Helen. I miss Helen so much. I think I wrote Secret Jewish Women's Business for her and I think that's why I so much want to see it in print. But while I miss her and while I realise that Australia is hugely worse off than when I started doing all these things twenty years ago, I'm tired. Not ordinary-tired. I'm beyond exhaustion.
I realised last night that there's a moment when selfishness becomes essential. I still feel guilty at reaching this moment.
I've been joking for months to my writing friends about my Secret Other Self and about my Mystery Life, while I sorted all this out. I was amused that my writing friends never seemed to work out that it was no secret at all. Maybe they're just very polite and were pretending not to know. While I joked though, I started retiring that secret self. Right now there are only two sets of meetings and phone calls, so many fewer functions and almost no dreadful deadlines. So much less hurting when the world is cruel.
I am lying about that last - how can I stop hurting when the world is cruel? This is why I can’t entirely let go. I'll still run my email lists for the Australian Virtual Centre for Women and the Law. And I have two more years to run on a particular national board.
What does twenty years add up to? I don't know yet. I'm too close to it. Ask me when I'm fifty.
A Canadian politician, though, told me twenty years ago that my writing could be as powerful as the work of a committee. She said that fiction can teach one to share a complex world. She said it could change things. She said this in a London pub and I listened, but not with my heart. In my heart I was writing for me, and anything that would change the world needed to be for others.
This was followed by a year from hell. I lost my father and I lost confidence in my writing and I fell back on my family's values. And my family is strong on good committee work as a way of helping a sad world.
Now I've come full circle. I've also discovered I can write. To be honest, I didn’t discover it - I still think I'm not much chop. Trivium Publishing (and especially Tamara Mazzei) did the hard work and published my first novel. And I love writing. Writing and editing a novel is the nearest thing to pure joy I've ever known.
Right now, I'm reminding myself of my answer in that Bloomsbury pub.
"It's a Fabian thing to change the world gently."
"It still does the job."
Committees are easier to hide behind when you lack self-esteem. I'm a bit short on self-esteem most of the time. I'm still going to gradually retire my Secret Other Self, though. I know that writing a novel about fractured lives and a rather strange mirror is not terribly important. I know it's selfish. But drabbit, if this is my mid-life crisis I intend to get some joy from it. I also intend to live for a long time to come. I've accepted the invitation to that final function: it's time now to fracture fictional lives for a bit.
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