Blog

Every year, I’m convinced it’s at the end of May, which means that I’ve sometimes missed it. This year, it was dumb luck that I checked on the weekend and all of a sudden realized that holy crap, my blogiversary is Thursday!

I had plans for it. There are going to be some neat things going on, but now I’ll just have to mutter something about me maybe getting my act together by the end of the month to make some changes around here. But maybe that’s a good thing, because today really isn’t about the blog, as such, it’s about you.

Friends got me started on the blogging thing five years ago and I jumped in without really knowing what I was going to do with it, instead figuring it out as I went along. It was going to be a place where I got into the discipline of writing, but I very soon came up with that idea about emotional honesty. The blog was “born” just five months after starting Enbrel, it was the first year of the rest of my life, I had just been given a second chance, not yet quite comprehending what it meant, but I knew that I was about to build my life and myself from the ground up.

And then something happened. Something completely delightful, unexpected and something which has improved my life immeasurably: people started leaving comments. Not just friends and family, but people I’d never heard of before.

Some of you have been with me since the beginning, some came later, some have moved on, but what all of you have in common is that you have been with me on this journey back to life, my companions on this ride of a second chance, being there while I figured out what it looked like, helping me shape a new adventure. You have laughed with me, offered me comfort and support during the times where things went sideways and backwards again, made me think more deeply and celebrated with me when life when forward it to a place I had never in my wildest dreams imagined it could go.

My biggest regret is that my writing/typing ability is so limited that I can’t email with all of you more, can only read your blogs, rarely leaving comments. It is a credit to these friendships we’ve managed to develop that you don’t leave, but come back again and again, even though you have to imagine part of the conversation. Somehow you know that I think of you often and you forgive and stay present, manage to receive – psychically? – all the things I want to say, but can’t. I am so grateful to you for sticking around, for the relationships we have, even though you mostly hear from me through the blog.

I once read a quote that said people are friends in spots. In my last post, I wrote about the RA spot and what it meant for me to find a place with others who live there. But there are other spots, spots I didn’t even know I had and only found through knowing all of you. Some of you share the chronic illness spot, some the sarcasm, others are found in the part of me that love reality shows and yet others in writing, in the second chance, in knitting )I don’t knit anymore, but once a knitter….) and in so many, many more. I share my life and my spots with each of you in different ways and I am so very lucky.

Because here, in this space with you, I am known.