How Blogging Changed My Life

This post wasn't meant to see the light for a while. I also really dislike the title, but I wasn't able to come up with anything better, more original, fresh or smart-sounding -- sorry about that! :) I wanted to write the post slowly, create a "masterpiece" that conveyed all my feelings about this subject. But then late last night I read Corey's beautiful post about meeting Alice and her family last summer (here's Alice's response) and it moved me so much, that I just couldn't wait to write about this.

When I started blogging, almost two years ago, I felt unbearably lonely. It's true that I had just moved to a new city from a place where I had lived for eight years (MA) and I had just had my second baby while caring for a 2 year old. Loneliness was not a new feeling for me, though. For eight long years I had missed my country and my friends and tried to cope with being an expatriate, a graduate student in another country, trying to fit in and teach in a college system that was quite different from the one I had been exposed to in Brazil. After I had my sons, though, and all our friends in Brazil started having children around the same time (in 2003-4, before moving from MA to PA, I had visited Brazil and our first-born children had all played together), it became even harder to be here, separated not only from our best friends, but also from their children.

Of course these friendships were mostly based on past experiences, but those had been intense enough to keep us very close. During all those eight years (it's been over ten now), my husband would argue with me that my problem with not having friends or not being as close as I wanted to my friends was something that I'd experienced even back in Brazil, and he was right in this respect. I always struggled with the fact that I was never able to remain as close I used to be to my high-school friends after we all went to college, got boyfriends, got married. The problem with me was that I needed to share a lot of myself in order to feel close to them. I always kept journals and wrote poems (which I shared with my friends), and even wrote them letters, but all that was a "one way" communication. After we moved to the U.S. virtually none of my close friends from Brazil ever wrote regular emails to me and that really made me very lonely (there's one exception, Marco, but he "doesn't count" because he's a blogger and a writer and he'd always respond to my emails because he loves to write, like me).

All right, I'm crying, almost sobbing, as I write this. Let me backtrack a bit. After I met my husband in 1990, we formed several life-long friendships in the years that led to our move to this country in 1996. He became close friends with several of my high-school friends and together we met lots of new people in the university and while singing in a choir that traveled all over the country. So we made many incredible friends and had unforgettable and profound experiences together. Then we left them all behind and embarked on a new journey. For 10 years we have been trying to keep in touch, meet for all-night-long conversations (although things get much more complicated when we all have children) when we go to Brazil, like the one that we had the night before I wrote this post. But it's always hard to try to convey eight, nine years of experiences in a foreign country to your friends who remained in Brazil, not to mention the fact that we sometimes had to waste a lot of time trying to make them understand how politics works here (Brazilians are generally VERY critical of the U.S., to the point of obnoxiousness, to say the least). Anyway, what I wrote on that post last January kind of sums up my relationship with blogging -- it came to mean "living" for me -- interacting with other people, getting to know people, so I wouldn't feel lonely and would feel alive. So I wrote:

These days I’m not blogging because I’m finally “living” instead of just pretending I have a life, which I is the case most of the time when I’m not in Brazil, particularly because I when I’m in the US I feel the need to be online a lot, it’s the only semblance to “having a life” that I can find in our lives there, my only way to interact with like-minded people, to meet new friends, etc. Depressing, isn’t it?

and

I finally don’t feel jealous of Jo(e), who’s one of my favorite bloggers, particularly because of her wonderful, moving posts about her family and her rich, fulfilling life experiences. And I feel like I can finally identify with many moments described by one of my favorite mama writers, Catharine Newman (e.g. I can’t even begin to describe here Kelvin’s budding relationship to our best friends’ daughter Beatriz [photo below], I can finally appreciate fully when Catharine writes about Ben and Ava. Too bad we’re going away in just 2 weeks

I have spent ten years torn between living here and going back to Brazil. I would often complain to my husband that I felt lonely, that we needed to go back to Brazil because only there we could have a satisfying social life and real friends. After the children were born, the friends there actually started begging us to come back, showing us how good friends our children were (which is true, see the photo on the left), how lovely it would be to have them grow up together (I'm going to start crying again) since they were all the same age and could be friends like we were. We still don't know if going back the way for us, there are so many issues at stake like I wrote on the post cited above.

One thing has definitely changed, or "evolved" from January to now. I no longer think that my "online life" as opposed to a "real life" is depressing anymore, on the contrary. All right, first let me say that I am aware that I'm absolutely addicted to blogging. I talk about blog posts and my blogger friends all the time with my husband (it was very tough to refrain from talking to my parents about it, I guess this is one of the reasons why we didn't talk much in the 10 months they were here, and I do feel kind of bad about this). Moreover, I often feel guilty about how much time I spend reading other people's blogs, commenting, and writing on my blog.

However, I started to feel OK about it one day after a long conversation in the car with my husband, driving back from Maryland one Sunday night last Summer. I was very surprised by what he told me. He said that I had become a much easier person to live with in the past year. That I didn't complain as much and that I was generally happy all the time. I just sat there, in silence, mulling his words over. I then said tentativelly,

"Don't you think then that it's bad that I spend so much time blogging? Am I not wasting my time?" and he responded that no, it wasn't. I won't ever forget what he said next, though:

"Have you noticed that you have stopped saying that you want to go back to Brazil?"

I just sat there, dumbfounded. Even I didn't know that blogging had changed my life that much. We were silent for a while, letting this realization sink in. It was only after I started to make friends through blogging, to feel part of a community that shared many of my interests and had similar experiences, that I felt truly happy and stopped wishing for an "external change" (going back to Brazil and to our "old" friends) to make my life right. We then talked of how meaningful it was to me to have "met" these people, how fulfilling it was to be able to share my thoughts and feelings with like-minded friends, even if virtually. I had found what I had been longing for all those years, struggling to try to find time to share my thoughts, my journals, my life, with my now very busy friends. My husband wisely concluded:

"You're the kind of person who needs to share yourself with other people and when that need is met [through blogging], you're a much easier person to live with."

I realize that all these years the pressure on him was huge. I mean, it wasn't easy on him being an expatriate either, but I'm sure it was even harder having his wife complaining (and he hates whining) about how you don't have any friends, how you don't have time to read what she wrote in her journal (he does read the blog now :), or and how we should go back to Brazil because then we wouldn't feel so lonely... Regardless of that, I'm truly glad that he appreciates and values my experience with blogging.

The best part of all these "virtual friendships" is that they can become "in real life" friendships too!! Corey's post describes this really well. First, I really identify with what Corey wrote about emails or written communication such as blogging: "when I write about my thoughts via email or a blog, I feel a kind of expanse of space and time, a limitless freedom to be who I am."

Then, her description of meeting Alice was so wonderful:

We were meeting each other for the first time “backwards”: We met for the first time already knowing each other's difficulties, struggles, foibles and pet peeves rather than first putting up our best personas until our true selves slowly seeped through. But meeting that way means having already gotten to know each other and not needing to start from the beginning. We met already having gained the trust of the other.

I felt a similar connection with Cloudscome when we met over the Summer. I'm really looking forward to the day when I get to meet Alice, Corey, Kate, Juliet, Jo(e), Articulate Dad, Professing Mama, Professor Me, Aliki, and many others (I'm not including the links, sorry) in person as I have already met Kateri, Jo, Andi, Marta, and Cloudscome.

And now, Corey, you have to email me your phone number so I can call sometime so you can hear my voice, and I yours! :)