Why Two Blogs?

For me these days it’s three if you count face book.  I gave in and joined them when someone from school invited me.  I keep things shallow there.   The main two are this one, and the one that has existed for family as long as I’ve known what a blog is.  We moved across the country away from family, and then had a child, so I worked on putting out information that the grandparents could see on the internet.  It’s read by them and a couple of cousins and aunts, plus a few local folks all pretty sporadically.  I think my mother is the only one who checks it daily.  Sometimes I don’t post for a month mind you, but still she checks.

This blog is for me to talk about cancer,  first and foremost.   Not my farm, my pets, what I’m cooking or how the plants are doing.  Those things may also appear, but I don’t set out to focus on them.  I focus of feeling frightened because my leg doesn’t work.  I focus on my anger at life with cancer — well, not so much on my anger, maybe that’s a post still to come.    I don’t write about that for family because they don’t get it.  My sister-in-law, who reads the other blog occasionally lives with, or is surviving, or is currently in remission from lung cancer, she’d probably get it.  The rest of them, my dad announced I was cured the first time I was in remission.  At the same time as announcing my mother’s chronic illness would be life long and there to stay.  I shook my head and cried.

The other blog does get the occasional mention of cancer, as well as of fibromyalgia, although they are both likely to be veiled under “chronic illness” as anything else.    I didn’t mention the gamma knife radio surgery there at all, although there’s a link to it in the side bar, password protected.  No one who didn’t already have the password has ever asked for it.  No one who originally read the other blog has been given the link to this one.  And I don’t rush around giving out that link either.

I’ve had other blogs that are separate from the family blog in the past.  I often feel better having a place to express myself that is not obvious to folks I’m immediately related to.  One went defunct when the person who owned the server ran in to hard times — I still own the page, I think I even have access to it again, but there was about a year when I didn’t, and now it’s been three or so.

I guess it’s compartmentalizatiion.  It’s working for me.   No one here says “oh you’re handling this so well” or “you have such a hard life”, or any of those other greatly helpful and well meant things that I’ve heard.  That makes this a safer place to whine and complane and be frightened, to talk frankly about things that are bothering me.  I try to put in positive things too, or at least not to only whine and complain.  There is more to my life.  I just have to remember to post it  here.