I might be guilty of repeating myself about the place writing plays in my retirement life. If so blame the quote from yesterday’s Guardian Book Review. The title of her (do I call it an article?) article is ‘Why I write’ by Joan Didion. She says,
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
She, also in her article, writes ‘there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.’ Wow, that’s quite controversial.
You can tell she’s a proper writer. I am quite incapable of writing anything so literary ranging from the insightful (first sentence) to the bonkers (second sentence). I’ll certainly go along with the idea that writing something out of my head enables me to make sense of and cope with life’s little challenges. Like this pandemic thing. This may be why I’m writing or at least posting more than my traditional two retirement blogs a week even if one of these is a retro blog from way back when. I think there may actually be more crap inside my head at this time and that’s quite an achievement.
As for the second passage, well, I think I would be flattering myself if I thought these modest little blogs would get anywhere near my reader’s ‘private spaces’, unless of course your ‘private space’ is particularly empty, let alone worry that I was in some way bullying these same readers. I should be so powerful.
As for these readers, these retirement blogs, as well as providing a release for my tortured soul, I do hope that they might provide some small enjoyment for my readers but to enjoy the blogs you would need to at best appreciate or at least tolerate my superficial, butterfly mind approach to life and particularly the more serious side of that life. If that sounds perverse then so be it.
I’ve written before that a person who retires needs a new identity to replace that which supported them through their career phase of life. Not everybody needs such a prop of course but I, for one, did / do. I overall liked my job and how it made me feel about myself. It fed my self-esteem and all that good stuff. So when I retired I needed something else to like about myself. My retirement self-esteem definitely needs some on-going support.
Never more so than this wet, cold Sunday morning when, for some reason I still can’t fathom (and that’s the most debilitating type), I had one of my possibly virus / lockdown dips. Life seemed a little grey at best and grim (my late mother’s favourite word) at worst. So I sat down to write this blog (and whatever it turns out to be about), with my writing as therapy hat on. I’ll let you know if it works at the end.
So I’m saying that blogging suits me well. Much better than being a proper writer. I’ve tried writing a novel and a number of short stories. The size of the task is disempowering for me and this format does not suit the superficial / butterfly type of mind, even a short, short story, whereas 1,000 word blog each about a different possibly unrelated topics. Although retirement is supposed to be the broad unifying theme, it often isn’t. So a bit of literary pottering, i.e. blogging, for a person with a short attention span suits me very well.
It must do, given I’ve written well over 800 retirement blogs over the last 7 years. And though I do not like to brag, I must just say that this last week for the first time ever in my blogging career (the one that replaced my previous career as a psychologist), I found that if I Googled retirement blog* (although not retirement blogs- plural) – I was number one, Top of the Pops. True I’m number two now but that’s not too shabby for a superficial butterfly like me. I even took a screen shot of my number one status. That’s it below. Pathetic I know but somebody has to do it.
I can’t honestly say I’ve grown the blog quality-wise. All the topics down the right-hand side of this retirement blog have remained unchanged. I have added the podcast and retro category but the rest remain the same. Quite a few of these categories remain largely under-developed. I should remove them but basically I’m too idle to do so. So here they remain.
I’m pretty much at the end of this retirement blog and I said I’d let you know whether my writing (a retirement blog in this case) as therapy, worked. And yes, I think it has. I feel that by lunchtime I have ‘achieved’ something and that was sufficient to lever up my somewhat negative mood of the morning. Of course it’s only Sunday and this blog won’t be posted until Tuesday so it could all have fallen apart by then. I’ll keep you informed as always.
The image above, in case you’re wondering what these strange hieroglyphics are, is a picture of the Sunday page of my diary after I’d written this retirement blog. You won’t be able to read my writing but it’s 5 things, about the moment, that I wrote down to remind myself things aren’t so bad. A record of the positive effect of this blog and another plus for writing stuff down.
*Bizarrely it was at the suggestion of my son-in-law that I started to Google ‘blog’, singular and opposed to what I had been googling, blogs, plural, that my ranking improved. He said it was something to do with the plural version was competing with all those websites that and he was right. I’ve popped in the screenshot below as proof of what I’m saying.
