Reasons why I write

The other day, my friend and I were talking about blogs and blogging and the subject of readership and popularity came up, as it will when you have this awesome cool stats page available to you and she asked me if anyone actually read this thing. The truthful answer is no, not really. I get people cruising in from various places, but it’s not linked anywhere and generally, the daily count is under ten, usually under five. (Unless it’s something controversial, like the Golden Compass. Or knitting related, because knitters are everywhere.)

I don’t care about that.

This blog is one of the many places for me to write in. True, I do write as if someone will come along and read it and so it’s not as deeply personal as, say, my paper journal, but that’s a necessity of the public aspect of wordpress.

I made the decision to keep this accessible to others as a way for me to practice being honest. Expressing myself to others has always been difficult, so I’ve used the public nature of the blogging world to open up, even if it’s opening up to a vast vacuum of silence. The point is, it’s out there and the thought is that if I have it written down where anyone might see it, maybe it will become easier to talk to people that I actually know in the real world.

So if we start comparing, you’ll probably come out on top, but I don’t mind.

(I am amused that this is being filed under “Introduction” even though it’s nowhere near the start.)

Sparkle

I recently come across a list of ribbon awareness colors. I’ve also had this bauble pattern waiting to be created when I had time. As I was looking through the awareness colors, the two ideas come together. I would create my own awareness bracelet. Even if no one realized what it was, it would help me feel more open and honest. And so I created.

This has turned into a really special project for me. It has kept me busy over the last couple of days which were really difficult to get through.

The main color is green, for depression. The secondary color is orange for self injury. I know the beads look sort of brown, but they’re meant to be orange. Tertiary is yellow, for suicide awareness. It’s really hard to tell that they’re yellow because I had to choose a really light bead color to match the green, but there’s yellow in there. The fourth bead type I have in there is a clear crystal, meant to be white. I read somewhere that orange and alot of white was a recovered self injurer and that orange and one white was still in recovery. I can’t remember where I read that, so I can’t reference it, but I included it anyway.

It turned out really well. It’s a little bigger than I would like due to an extra row for finishing, but it’s very shiny.