One month on

Shame on me.

Last Saturday my blog was one month-old and I didn’t even post. Nothing. The first time this month I have not kept my promise, and it was the day I should have celebrated.

First I need to thank you, that is everyone who comes and stops by, especially those of you who take the trouble of commenting. It means the world to me.

I also have to make amends. Not only will there be two blog posts this week (this one for last week and another tomorrow for this week), here is a magnificent drawing from me, the likes of which I am certain you have never seen before:

I used to draw little people in the margins of all my books at school and soon fairies took over. I thought I would post it as a peace offering. I know, right, I'm so talented it's a wonder I don't burst.

As I wrote this, I thought back to what I have shared this month and it triggered a random memory from my childhood.

In my first year of secondary school, I had a group of friends I didn’t really get on with. One thing they didn’t like about me was that I boasted. If you know me now this might come as a shock (unless you know me particularly well), but considering that until the age of ten I was a pretty confident child then it might be they were right.

Obviously I don’t think they were. I distinctly remember one occasion when they accused me of boasting and I had indeed said something along the lines of, ‘I’m so great at this game’.

Except I had just lost.

Now it might have been that they had an unsuspected insight into my personality of which even I was unaware. Perhaps they had sensed that beneath the superficial self-deprecation and light-heartedness lay a deep fear of failure and an insatiable desire for perfection which leads to perpetual frustration with myself and against which the only weapon is humour, a flaw of character my parents frequently refer to as my ‘misplaced pride’, as if it were something I had put down somewhere and lost - though my mum does believe I am pretty bad at finding things so maybe it isn’t so far-fetched an idea. (Does that qualify for the longest sentence ever or is Proust still in the running?)

But somehow I don’t think so. I think they just didn’t get sarcasm.

This brings me to us. All throughout this month, I haven’t censored myself. I have pondered and edited and moderated. But I have told my internal censor, the one that usually stops me from taking part in normal conversations, to go and do something rather rude. I have opened up and taken the risk of showing what goes on inside my head. The little message underneath my picture doesn’t lie: I am hiding behind my computer screen, but that's precisely what makes it so liberating.

Yet now I fear that I have said too much. I hesitated to post this for exactly the reasons I usually censor myself: fear of what people will think. I worry that, despite the reading warning, my declarations of amazingness will be taken literally, just like they were when I was eleven.

As I celebrate the birthday of my blog, and blow on the virtual candles to wish it a long and prosperous life, I reiterate: please don’t take me too seriously. I do, and that’s already one person too many.