Profiles and Secrets

It’s one of those do or die days where I have to sit here at the computer until something falls out of my brain that’s halfway worthy of writing down. I not only have a blog post to write for next week but I also have a piece to write for my creative writing group. I’d truly like to quit the writing group but it’s not big enough to survive without me and the others in the group seem to get a lot out of our band of merry scribes. When I first started the group I thought I could kill two birds with one stone---look at me using that tired, old metaphor---and write essays that could serve double duty, but that didn’t work out. No one here knows I keep a blog and since people living on my continuum care campus are often the subject of my blog posts I want to keep it that way. The bottom line is I can’t read my posts here in my writing group. And I seem to be fresh out of poems, after writing twelve about my campus.

A few days ago I was asked to write a profile for our campus newsletter. It’s a by-monthly publication short on content but it’s put together by two retired graphic artists turned college professors. What it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. It’s a full color newsletter printed on slick, shiny paper and is full of lots of photos. It also features two profiles of residents and each profile is written by the person being featured. “So it will be your voice, sharing what others might not know about you,” I was told. What a daunting task for someone who keeps so many secrets from my neighbors! In the past, the newsletter has printed three of the above mentioned poems. Submitted by invitation and they were well received if you can judge such things by the comments others made after they were printed. But a profile? I wrote and submitted it before I could chicken out because it’s so different than any of the other profiles printed in the past. Most people, for example, have listed where they went to college, their job titles, the number of children and grandchildren or their travel experiences, places they've lived, etc. etc.

Here is what I wrote and you might recognized a few lines borrowed from the top of this blog: 

“When I was asked to write a profile for Insight in 200 words or less my first thought was how can I do that without sounding like I’m writing a profile for a dating app? “Woman, widow, senior citizen seeking to live out my days with a sense of whimsy as I search for inner peace.” Yup, that sums up where I’m at in life right now, having lost my soul mate of 42 years a few years back. Life was good until it wasn’t when my husband had a massive stroke that left him right side paralyzed and with no verbal or written means of communication for the next 12 1/2 years and I transitioned into being his caregiver extraordinaire. For every Yin in life there is a Yang and my Yang came in the form of me becoming a mentor, a chat room host and an administrator on a large website in the stroke community, eventually taking a seat on the Board of Directors. I’m no longer active or associated there, but I still spend my mornings living in cyber space.

“Along with the invitation to write a profile came a list of questions and one was about hobbies and collections. It’s safe to say that I’ve tried every craft and hobby that’s crossed my path, with creative writing staying on the list the longest and Mahjong being the newest hobby added. My most unusual collection? A large jar full of every single watch I’ve ever owned including a sundial watch that only works on sunny days." ©

What do you think? Did I manage to write a profile that still left my secrets intact? The biggest secret of all is my online life in the blog community followed up by the fact that while my husband and I were soul mates for 42 years we didn’t get married until after his stroke. I know from a book club discussion that few people here in the land of long marriages would understand why we didn’t get married sooner rather than later. And the explanation is too complicated and would reveal too many personal facts that I’m not willing to put into the gossip mill around here. Even my path to getting a college degree was not in a straight line and just listing the place where I got it doesn’t begin to express how proud I was to finally get the degree 25 years after I started working on it. 

Well, I managed to knock out a blog post, Now I have to work on April’s writing prompt for my writing group’s meet-up on Thursday. It’s a tough one: “Until that moment, she hadn’t realized the past can change.” Each month we plan to draw a prompt out of an envelope based on the Ten Word Stories we wrote in January. Our first writing prompt bought some great results---all vastly different. This one is frying my brain. Wish me luck!

Until next Wednesday.  ©

Writing Prompts and Secret Blogs

I had to resort to looking at writing prompts to come up with a topic today. That won’t be true come Saturday, having several fun things on my day planner to report on by then. But today I’m still in a dry spell. So what writing prompt did I pick from the list of 365? I went with the one listed for July 9^th…the day I’m actually writing this post which is: “Keep out! Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” If you want to challenge the writer within---and I do---you can’t pick and choose the prompts that come easy for you.

I was, however, tempted to pick July 16^th which was: “Dream home. You win a contest to build your dream home. Draft the plans.” I drew my first set of house plans when I was 13 or 14 and I haven’t stopped designing houses in my head and often on paper ever since. Dead center of my first house was a three stories high, round foyer containing a spiral staircase with a glass dome overhead. Two wings went off the foyer---one the formal living room and a library, and the other for the kitchen and dining room. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a massive landing overlooking the foyer. Kids. What do they know about anything? When I ran across those plans as an adult, the house looked like a brick prison with its flat roof and with all the windows at the back. Over the years my house planning aspirations have changed. The last set of plans I drew up since becoming a widow was a one bedroom house the size of a two car garage. But both my first and last imagery houses were built on Lake Michigan.

“Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” It wasn’t my husband when he was alive and I was blogging on a stroke support site. I was writing about my experiences as his caregiver and I'd often read what I wrote to him as a way of communicating. And I have Oprah’s back-then fad of writing a gratitude journal to thank for finding humor in my upside down world. After Don’s stroke I was under enormous stress. He had lost his ability to walk, the use of his right arm and his speech. It took six months of speech therapy just to learn to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and they weren’t reliable even at that, so having “conversations” literally took hours where I had to debate both sides of what we needed to do to move forward. He thought he was going to get his old life back and I knew that was impossible.

The other person in world who I really want to read my blog is oldest my niece and she often does. It keeps me striving to be fair, honest and without embellishments when I write about my family. I love her like a daughter and wouldn't most people want their daughters to understand where you’ve been and where you’re at in life? (Patience, I am getting to the list of those who I don’t want to read my blog.)

Only a few others have had a personal invitation to read my blog: 1) a friend I've had since I was five; 2) a friend I met through my husband 48 years ago; 3) one of my Red Hat Sisters and 4) one of my Gathering Girls pals. The two old friends are...well, everything you'd want in an old friend (except they both live out of state) and like my niece, the thought that they might see what I've written keeps me striving to be as accurate as possible when I share memories here. The Red Hatter is a writer of immense talent and she understands that you have to dive deep into your head to write memoir and journal-type stuff---spilling the good, bad and the ugly along the way. She's only read my blog a few times out of curiosity. My Gathering Girls friend may be reading more frequently but she’s a genuinely nice person who’d never intentionally hurt anyone by repeating something negative I might have written. Trust. The bottom line is I trust all these ladies not to use what they read here as gossip fodder.

As you can see, I don't make a habit out of inviting people in my offline life to read my blog although I make no secret of it. A link to my blog is even in my bio on Facebook but to the best of my knowledge only one person has actually found it buried in the fine print and have been here to read---Tim, the son-I-wish-I-had. Tim and I are extreme opposites in our politics and Pro-life/Pro-choice support. He’s very religious and I call myself an agnostic but we’ve had many respectful, in-depth conversations so I know he wasn’t and won’t be shocked or offended by anything he reads here. I can’t say that about most of the people I come in contact with in this very conservative county in West Michigan and I have not been willing to take that chance. Until the past few years, I’ve gone above and beyond to hide my opinions on controversial topics and core values. I'm still very careful. Why? Out of fear of being ostracized. If someone in the blog community doesn't like you based on your world views, they'll just move on and you’d never know about it. In person, it's more complicated.... ©

Easier said than done.