Self-indulgent

I haven’t blogged for ages.  I’ve had lots of ideas, I often find myself doing something mundane, like hanging out the washing and thinking of something that I want to share on here.  I’m not sure anyone would read it, but it’s a kind of therapy, isn’t it?  Writing down your thoughts, sharing them, even in this sense where maybe nobody will reply.

I’m having the hate part of the love/hate internet relationships business.  It seems these days I have most of my friendships, communicate with my old friends and family online.  It’s weird, using only language to communicate with people.  Lots of things get misunderstood, there are not the lovely complexities of communication that we get face to face with people.  The impressions that we get from someone’s presence.  Nobody is really and truly as they seem, because if verbal communication is only 7% of communication, then surely that means with internet friendships we are only seeing 7% of a whole person’s thoughts/ideas.  Even with people that you know in the “real world”.  I miss REAL conversations in person.

And I realised that I rely on the internet too much.  I spend too much time spouting drivel that I really think nobody is all that bothered about.  Sometimes I think it’s the small things that make for good conversation though, just these days, I’m a bit fed up of it.  I can’t say where it started, but things came to pass that I felt a lot of people moan a lot of the time.  Don’t get me wrong, I moan too.  It’s good to moan.  But not all the time.  And not about everything.  Just when you think one moan has been solved, another moan starts and I wonder when people will be happy with what they said they wanted in the first place.  I started thinking about people’s moans and groans and thinking things like, “hey, I’m worse off in that respect, but I don’t moan”.  Then I started feeling a bit sorry for myself and thinking, if they are moaning about that, and my situation is worse, shouldn’t I be moaning and feeling miserable?  And I started feeling a bit irritated and dissatisfied.

So I woke up one morning, wondered what the hell I had to feel miserable about.  I have a secure home, a house, a car, a husband, two children, family, friends, my health.  How dare I get so self-indulgent and wallow in the negative things.  Ok, my husband works all the hours God sends, I don’t have many friends in this area, my in-laws both work full-time, my family live in another country, I can’t seem to follow the career paths I want to because Japan is not my home, and well, my biggest sadness is that I’m not enamoured with this country.  But you know, I have three options,

1.  I could wallow in misery and regret in Japan making everyone in my house miserable.

2.  I could leave my husband and attempt to let him allow me to take our two children with me to the U.K. where I would have no husband, no money, no job and nowhere to live.

3.  I could stop bloody whingeing and start making the best of life instead of moaning about things when I have more than some people could even hope for.

So I have decided to go for option number three.  In a very British way (of course Brits moan and groan, but there is usually a silver lining and I am trying to be an old-school Brit), I will Keep Calm and Carry On.  This means that I am becoming less active in the social networking sense for the moment, because I realised that negativity can spread like wildfire, but hoping to blog when I can.