Where ever I’ve been, I’m back.

I’m frustrated with the some of the antics on Dear Diary, and I’m frustrated with some of the doings in my life.

I never thought anything of keeping two diaries on DD. They have two entirely different purposes. One is more of a newsletter than anything else, keeping a group of people up to date on events. It is not a chronicle of my daily life, except for the part of my life that interacts with these other people. Few people other than those who are actually mentioned in that diary ever post comments there. My Salamander diary grew out of my need to organize my thoughts about MY life. It has nothing to do with the lives of the people on the message board that I co-administer, except for the ways my emotions and opinions are impacted by what they have to say. I’ve been up front about keeping another diary elsewhere. For those who have left comments on deardiary1 that it should be a hard and fast rule “One diary per person”, accept my apologies for failing to meet your criterion. Feel free to exact your revenge by never reading this diary again. I’ll understand. I’ll even approve.

Which leads me to a related subject – why do people persist in reading diaries that upset them? If I don’t like what is being written, why should I persist in returning to the diary time and again, giving the author more and more hits and additional incentive to continue? I have a small “ignore” list. I don’t like it = I don’t read it. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s fun. The ultimate in thumbing my virtual nose. It makes me feel good, and hurts no one’s feelings, which makes it a win-win proposition.

The negativity and sniping has led me to re-evaluate why I’m even writing an on-line diary. Why not just keep a Word file or an old fashioned pen and paper chronicle? The obvious answer is that opening my life up to others gives me the chance for input and interplay that you don’t get from simply writing down your thoughts. Opening my life up to strangers means that their comments aren’t colored by previous knowledge of who I am. In addition, this format gives me a chance to find out that I’m not alone. Somewhere along the way, I lost track of that.

There’s a sort of greedy glory in getting comments. Comments are a form of approval-drug that can be addictive. When I discover that I get comments for saying “X” but not saying “Y”, I subconsciously stopped writing about “Y” and began concentrating on “X”. And that’s wrong. That’s not what the diary was about, for me. So I tried an experiment.

I wrote about something I had strong feelings about, without regard to who would read it. And I got a surprise. I actually got more comments about that than anything else I wrote to date. Most of the comments were well thought out. Many didn’t agree with me. It gave me a chance to reflect, change my mind a little bit, firm up my opinions a little bit.

It would have been great except that one person used the comments as a platform for their own personal vendetta. Unhelpful comments were made, unsolicited e-mail was sent to those who disagreed with this person’s stand. The feelings of someone that I’ve come to like were hurt. I didn’t want my diary being used as a launch point for this sort of thing.

So I turned my diary off and made it closed for a week. And suddenly I was writing for just me again. The text reads truer. The thoughts are more mine. But without a sounding board, my thoughts echo rather hollowly. I might as well just have gone out and bought myself a nice leather bound book of blank pages.

So I’m back, with some lessons learned and better knowledge of my motivations and myself. I’ll leave some entries on Private (I imagine most people keeping a true journal here do the same thing). But it was an exercise worth undertaking. And this entry is long enough, so I’ll save my personal woes for later.