Recalibrating

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I was asked last week if I "ever get tired sharing [my] life for public consumption. Oddly enough, that dovetailed with me, for the first time...becoming tired of sharing my life for public consumption.

I'm what you'd call an "over". Overthinker, over-sharer, over-lover. Dissecting my issues and laying them out like a patient etherized upon a table has always helped me come to terms with whatever has needed the terms come to. But sometimes the words only invite more words in an endless deluge that becomes more painful than therapeutic and get me no closer to any sort of resolution. 

That poem, which I've quoted twice now? One of my favourites. Thanks to moves and curriculum changes, I took this poem each of my four years of high school (I graduated when OAC, grade 13, was still a thing, but at my parents' urging, I rigged it so I could essentially skip Grade 12.)

I certainly cared for this poem a LOT more than the other work I took four years running (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 

Prufrock and I are broadly similar people. I knew it as a teenager, when I already felt middle aged most of the time, often paralyzed with indecision and prone to depressive episodes. Now, thirty years on, I don't identify quite so much with J. Alfred. I know, for example, that mermaids will sing to me. That said, I share his habit of relentless self-analysis, with emphasis on the flaws.  All these years, I have been following an epigram I slapped on a very early Breadbin entry, even today one of my favourite entries:

Look for a long time at what pleases you, 

and longer still at what pains you... 

--Colette

It's been fifteen years of long and longer looks. Three shutdowns, one to remove a single impediment to writing for actual money (there being about fifty other impediments meant that was doomed before it got off the ground); the others out of simple world-weariness. 

I'm not finished with this blog, but I am going to refocus it. You'll see the changes. They're conscious changes, moving away from the hyper-personal (and self-critical) and towards engaging with wider issues. 

There will also be very little, if anything, on polyamory going forward. 

That last is not because I have renounced polyamory. It's partly because I've said about all I can think of to say on the topic, and partly because there are potential new horizons on my horizon and I'd much rather err on the side of caution when it comes to privacy going forward. I didn't always do that in the past and it bit me. I've made my apologies privately; you may take them as read here, but going forward, I'll be doing a fair bit privately.

Some of you are probably sighing in resignation, others in relief.  Please bear with me as I recalibrate.