Negative but True

I talked to a friend yesterday who said she’d been reading my blogs.

I said, “You have?”

She said, “Yeah. I try to keep up with what’s going on with you. Your blog is interesting, but it doesn’t tell me much.”

I thought, ‘It doesn’t?’ Man. I feel like I’m right out there.

I’d just been thinking a few days ago about what another friend said to me, a guy who’s done a lot of reading of a lot of my writing. He said that much of my former writing (scads of unsubmitted manuscripts) was like journal writing, but that with The Given Self I had written with that little bit of distance that allowed for more perspective, and it worked.

I was thinking that I had achieved that with these blogs too: Still personal, but not so personal that they had that overly inward and sometimes narrow perspective of the journal, where I, at least, write my way through all kinds of daily stuff and junk. But really, that was still true with The Given Self. I had that feeling of personal immediacy as I wrote it.

I love reading journals though, and so I wonder this morning if I’m getting away from my roots. I’m wondering…not in an anxious way…but in a pondering way. Is the blog a place where a good friend ought to be able to know what’s going on with you?

Meanwhile, I read an article in the paper this morning about on-line complaints. It caught my eye because I was thinking about posting one about my website company and my inability to get them to make updates. The article was about the line between criticism and defamation. A lawyer gave a definition. He said that when you write something negative but true, it is not defamation.

My website complaint is pretty straight forward and I’ve got tons of evidence (begging, pleading, negotiating, e-mails sent – always giving the benefit of the doubt – Is there something I haven’t provided you? Isn’t this our agreement? Let’s clarify our agreement. And finally, “Here’s what I need and if you can’t do it tell me so I can go elsewhere” after which I was made promises that were not kept.)

I’ve got a lot of “negative but true” stuff going on in my life. Some of it isn’t quite so straightforward. Some is. It feels like a stage I’m in. One of those “Everything you need to take care of is going to be in your face until you take care of it,” stages. My daughter has accused me of being negative more than a few times and I’ve responded (more than a few times) that I’m not being negative, I’m stating facts or truth.

So let’s just say there’s a bigger privacy element to this kind of thing – to the “negative but true” matters in life. In some ways, I feel the privacy issue lets me step beyond the details of the particular to the feelings that are more universal, but it could be that it’s this that makes my friend feel as if she doesn’t know what’s going on with me.

Maybe it’s not “spiritual” to call anything negative, and the ability to see it all as a gift that lets you work through a challenge or two (or thirteen) ought to override the negative. But if you’re getting a divorce, dealing with job or financial or sandwich generation issues, if you are working to change any of the really major patterns in your life, make mid-life adjustments, or even just to create the space for a new direction to unfold, the “negative but true” is going to rear up and make you forget, on occasion, that some things are just plain true and that you’ve got to look at the actuality of the situation.

Even worse, is when some things aren’t just plain true, and you’ve got to worry about perspective and do a little discernment. Neither place is much fun.

There’s a story Carolyn Myss once told about a trip from hell. After many, many “negative” things occurred, she complained to the man sitting next to her on a train, who turned out to work for the Dalai Lama (this could only happen to Carolyn Myss). The man says to her that when a bunch of stuff like that happens in a row, the Buddhists believe that you are being distracted so that something new can be born.

Now there’s a different perspective – the distraction part. To me, it seems that all these “negative but true” things need my full attention and that NOT letting myself get distracted from them is the way to see them through to conclusion.

The negatives of a trip from hell are not the same thing as the negatives that sit on your chest for being there in your life day after day. But I suppose the actions are still the same, and that if I’m being distracted by all of this so that something new can be born, it’s still the exact result that’s being hoped for.