Hildegarde

This is number 5 in a series. If you want to start at the beginning, scroll down until you find number 1.

I am having a very odd day.

A little while ago, I posted a status on Facebook that went like this:

“Somebody should send me 3 extra large pizzas, 3 orders of garlic bread with cheese, and a large garden salad with blue cheese dressing.

That would make this a better day.”

The weird thing about this is that it’s literally true. If that stuff showed up at my door an hour from now, my day would be so vastly improved that it would be hard to exaggerate the difference from what this day is going to be like instead.

If I could get it sent from my local hole in the wall family owned pizza place, it would be even better.

The reasons why I can’t do this for myself today are complicated, and more self revelatory than I’m willing to be at the moment.

And that brings up an issue I hadn’t really considered when I decided to restart this blog.

Given the cancer, and the vast number of issues that trail along with it, I find myself running into a wall that is the fact that this blog is public.

Anything I put up here will be seen not just by me and mine, and not just by the people who already know about everything that is going on, but by dozens of people who know nothing about me at all.

And that brings me to a dilemma.

On the one hand, there’s not a lot of point to this blog if I don’t tell the truth, and the whole truth, about what I am living through.

On the other hand, I hate the feeling of being overexposed, and I REALLY hate the idea of presenting myself as Poor Little Me.

If there’s one thing my situation has brought home to me, it’s that no matter how bad this all has gotten—and some of it, including today, has been really, really bad—taken as a life as a whole, it’s been much better than a lot of other people’s.

This is true in a worldwide perspective. I’m not being gassed in Syria. I haven’t been kidnapped by Book Harum. I’m not being executed for blasphemy in Pakistan or subjected to female genital mutilation in the Ivory Coast.

But this is also true if I only compare myself to other more or less middle class Americans.

After all, neither of my children died at Parkland or Sandy Hook.  I haven’t descended into dementia. The cancer is mine and not Matt’s or Greg’s.

But even though I can point to all those things, I’m also sure that I’m not the only one who is working very hard not to sound like Poor Little Me. There are lots of us out there, and certainly on my Facebook feed, being careful not to give out information about how bad things get.

There’s a part of me, though, that wishes some other people would be more explicit,  if only so I could know if the things that happen to me are normal,  or such ridiculous outliers that I have a right to an emotional meltdown.

And there’s a part of me that thinks I should stop vaguebooking, or concealing things altogether, so that people who read what I write can get the same information.

I’m going to go off now and dream about all that pizza I can’t get.