Susan Senator

Blogs are a strange and wonderful thing. We all like to beat up on them, calling them tools of self-absorbed folk, and outlets for others who have nothing better to do than read other people’s business. But I don’t think that. I think blogs are a brilliant new phenomenon, and only years from now will we start to know what are the effects of creating public diaries that are eternally accessible to others. In the past, people wrote diaries for themselves and intended for the most part to keep them private. Now we have the weblog, which is one’s private thoughts but which is obviously public. Why do we do this?

I find that blogging satisfies a need I must have had for a long time, that went otherwise unmet. I am forced to organize my thoughts, knowing that people are going to be reading them, and also to think about what I say and don’t say, because it is, as I said, public and forever (even when you remove the damned thing). I get the joy of seeing my work “published,” in the sense that it is in a format that the public can get to. I also hear from others, in a controlled manner, not face-to-face, which can be all kinds of things.

A lot of people have told me that they both love reading this blog and that they feel a little like they are getting illicit snippets of a friend’s life, which makes them feel like it’s kind of a guilty pleasure. But read it they do.

To them I say: pleasure is good; guilt, not so much! I am honored and puzzled by the fact that so many people find my self-absorbed soul-searching and worries interesting. Please know that I write this blog because it gives me an easy way to express myself, without paying a shrink or boring my husband and friends too much. It allows me to further raise consciousness about autism as a part of life, and also, to make people aware that just because one is a middle-aged wife and mother of a disabled child and two others, doesn’t mean she is some kind of lifeless martyr-drudge.

I usually do not put in more than I am comfortable with, knowing as I do that on the Internet, you live forever! And believe me, there is still a whole lot that I leave out, and even keep to myself. I learn from the responses I get, or don’t get, where I have struck a nerve, who agrees with me, etc. That is a gift. I love that. It makes me feel less alone in this noisy, disturbing world of ours. Blogging — and getting your responses — makes me feel less vulnerable, more connected to others.

So if you keep reading, thinking, and commenting, I’ll keep spewing, venting, fantasizing, and writing.