Ah - some days I feel like a freak!

I was recently told in a very heated and unpleasant discussion that I don’t share. The person wasn’t talking about sharing items as in sharing your toiletries while traveling. Instead they were talking about sharing my thoughts and feelings; in essence, opening up my life to others and sharing what goes on inside my head.

As hard as it was to hear – they were right.

After ten years of not being in any real relationships (God that hurt to even type that) and five years of traveling and living nomadically few things actually make it out of my mind and into words because there’s really no one to verbalize to. I sort of chalk it up to the fact that this is the life of a solo traveler and a very independent, single person.

You might be surprised to hear this if you have read this blog for a while. You probably feel that I share a lot of information publicly. However consider this – you only hear what I decide to share. And even that is finely crafted and controlled. The beauty of blogging and social media is that you have a delete and publish button. I decide what you hear and what you learn about me. And yes – sometimes my true thoughts are highly restricted or deleted.

Apparently I’m using a publish button in my personal relationships too. I rarely ‘publish’ anything verbally to my friends. I feel like my life is so distant from theirs that I don’t even know where to begin. So all they really get is the surface level. No one dives deep nor do I let them.

Me - a pixelated mystery

In fact lately I’ve been dealing with this huge gap in my life; the gap of what people think my life is like and what’s really going on in my head and my life.  The problem with editing is that it seems to be pushing me further away from the thoughts, feelings, and conversations in my head…the ones that never come out. The ones I don’t share. The gap is becoming a crevice and days it feels like a canyon.

I desperately want to fill in the canyon, and share again, but to whom? It takes a while to undo so much that has been done. And quite frankly I wonder if I will ever be someone that gushes personal information about myself. There’s a part of me that wants to remain a mystery…until I meet the right person to share that mystery with. At 41 I’ve been waiting a long time.

One thing I miss from my pre-blogging days is my journaling. I journaled for 7 years prior to me starting to share my stories online in 2006. I realized that the journaling for me was therapeutic; it’s how I was able to process thoughts and analyze my feelings. It was my therapist in a way. However when I stared blogging, I stopped journaling as the thought of writing on paper wasn’t as appealing any longer. Plus I just had no extra time to do it when I was working so hard at putting out my blog stories. The lack of journaling has finally caught up with me I believe.

I seldom share personal thoughts and feelings on this blog; which means that I rarely share personal thoughts and feelings anywhere. I’ve been fantasizing about opening up more, starting an outlet for the more personal side of me, my life, and my thoughts on this blog. Strangely, the pieces I write which are more personalized seemed to be the ones most people are interested in. I think it’s because we all go through the same things – and people can relate. However in the past I’ve decided to not share as much on my blog since quite honestly I’m scared.

But I’ve decided to give it a go. Starting in 2012 I’m going to try to write more personal posts under the section “Life” and the category “In my head”. They may be about travel, they may be about me, my thoughts, relationships, work, my insecurities, my sex life – or lack thereof. Don’t worry – there will still be all of the same travel info that I also do, but I’m not really sure what ‘In my Head’ will take on.  All I do know is that it won’t be highly edited…they will be simply what’s going on in my head.