Getting Published: Blogging The A Words

My name is Joanna and I am an anorexic.

Part of the problem is my lack of self-esteem and my need for personal validation. For more than twenty of those years I have been involved with a man who is unable to tell me that I am beautiful and that he cares for me. I had to do something to break the resulting vicious cycle of self-destruction.

My name is Joanna and I am also an adulteress.

Finding a man who could meet so many of my emotional needs was a wonderful gift but also caused me considerable guilt which just added to the arsenal of the opponent I was facing. It was a double-edged sword of satisfaction and shame with only one well-worn outlet…

… until my friend Angela introduced me to the world of blogging.

I signed up for an account in the January but it took me six nervous months to actually get myself together and make my first real post. Reading the words was like the whole cleansing breath thing in yoga. I could get the horrible emotions out of the vortex of venom inside my head and onto a virgin white screen. The sense of relief at setting them free was almost tangible.

For me, the purpose of my blog was pretty much confessional. I had to be as truthful as I could. It wasn’t that I wanted Absolution from my Reader, more that I wanted to get to the bottom of what caused my anorexia. What made me feel so out of control that I felt the need to starve myself. To do that, I had to analyse myself, my childhood, my teenage relationships and, of course, my marriage.

I wanted to try to see things from both sides. To be fair to him because the problem was there well before he entered the scene and his presence actually stopped some of the more dangerous self-harming aspects of this horrible illness. I needed to work out what was my fault and what wasn’t in terms of the deterioration of our relationship. To try to find out if there was something I should have done to stop the rot. And so there had to be complete honesty about what had occurred in order to find some sort of personal redemption. Not from other people, but from that hardest of taskmasters, myself.

I hoped that, by writing it down, I could help someone else who was anorexic or unhappy in their marriage.

What I discovered was that I was not the only one. There were so many people out there who could empathise with what I was writing and so many who were in identical marital situations. Bloggers of both genders. I was quite shocked by the lack of communication within so many externally successful partnerships which, internally, were ripping themselves to shreds. People who seemed so articulate in their writing and yet were unable to find the right phrases to express their needs to their life partner and to have them fulfilled.

My ongoing relationship with my lover changed so many things, including the focus of my blog. Finally understanding the nature of my personal battle with an eating disorder meant that I could start to celebrate the wonderful thing we had together. I couldn’t really talk about my affair in the real world so I shared my happiness with my virtual friends. I had often written erotic stories for my man when we were apart and he had encouraged me to find a way to put them before a wider audience. With that in mind, I proceeded to describe our physical interactions, partly to explore my love of the English language, but also so that I could relive each and every glorious moment of our time together.

However, in my joy at those halcyon days, I had forgotten that Fate has a way of giving with one hand and taking away with the other, which takes us to the worst A word. The one of which I am most ashamed. In the end I confronted it in the same way that I had the others. A way that lets me find at least a partial peace with the terrible thing that I did. My fingers tip-tip-tapping on a keyboard. Every excoriating, eviscerating emotion appearing on the screen. I knew my lover was reading and I talked to him. Sobbing out into the ether each gut-wrenching word that I couldn’t say face-to-face without dissolving into an incoherent wreck.

My name is Joanna and I had an abortion.

I found myself standing on a knife-edge with the old enemy waiting to drag me back down into the abyss but Blogging helped me to fight – for myself and for our relationship. And it was Bloggers who were my saviours in that horrible time. One who drove me to the clinic and home again, her stoic presence helping me to be strong. One who texted me throughout those days offering support and just showing that he cared. Several who emailed me privately to tell me their stories and give me counsel and solace. Not forgetting the supportive comments to my rambling posts at that time which meant so much. The kindness of strangers…

Blogdom is a strange place, in many ways a bit like the playground of my youth with its cliques and characters, its tiffs and traumas. We may not always agree with each other but the one thing that links us all together is a love of writing in all its forms. To watch an idea put forth by one person and see it taken and set free to explore all its dimensions in every direction by numerous other writers is an amazing thing.

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In Blogland, the word is our oyster.