Untold stories

Our lives are stories, and whether they’re big, sweeping epics, or small set pieces, they’re ours. Sharing stories is kind of the whole point of having a personal journal blog, like this one, but most people leave out far more than we share. It’s not always on purpose.

There are a lot of small stories that I never talk about here on this blog, though I may mention them on my personal Facebook. But lately some of those small stories (or, sometimes, small details of stories) have been missing entirely. Like this week.

On Monday, I talked about my clothes dryer breaking down, why that was an issue, and about how it fit into the other things going on at the time, on the eve of the third anniversary of Nigel’s death. In that post, I said. “for what it’s worth, I was feeling more or less positive” before the dryer broke. What I didn’t mention were any specifics of why that was the case, and that, in turn, was because I haven’t talked about a story behind part of that.

When summer was raging last year, I wanted to start walking, but I was concerned about my stamina. Ideally, I’d need somewhere with benches to rest on in case I needed them, and ideally a pretty flat area. None of that is true about the area around my house (though it’s kinda flat-ish), so I’d have had to drive somewhere. But that was only part of the issue.

My blood pressure medication had been changed, and I was having some issues with it, enough that I was adamant I needed a place to sit down if I felt unwell. So, one day I decided to walk around my back yard, which is flat, so I could go inside and sit down if I needed to. Unfortunately, it was also one of the hottest days of the summer.

Instead, I went back inside the house and walked a circuit inside the house, from one corner at the back of the house, to the opposite corner at the other end of the house, and including a big loop around the open-plan living/kitchen/dining area. This made a lot of practical sense: The house is climate controlled (not too hot in summer or too cold in winter), and it’s flat with firm, even footing on carpeted floors. Doing that, I found out, I could cover roughly a kilometre in 15 minutes. Better than nothing.

In the time since then, I’ve done that a few times, stamina/energy levels permitting, and especially when the weather outside was bad—too hot or too cold and rainy. It was raining a lot this past Monday, and I walked a circuit of 2 kilometres that day—while the first load of washing was in the washing machine, and I was oblivious about the dryer.

This was a thing I did that day that I felt positive about, but I couldn’t mention it because I hadn’t talked about it before, and I didn’t want to take the time to give the context (that the walk was my way of sneaking in some exercise on days when the weather was bad). The reason I felt like doing it all was that at the point I was still feeling upbeat, something that would soon end.

The middle of the week before, I was similarly feeling upbeat—and then I got a migraine, something I also didn’t share, mostly because I felt so bad (it was, I’d say, the second-worst I’ve even had). I felt utterly wiped out the next day, and with everything else going on, it was probably somewhat miraculous that I didn’t feel truly awful earlier this week.

I suppose that all of that goes shows it’s possible for a blogger to under-share.

I know this isn’t going to change, and that there will still be a lot that I won’t talk about. There’ll be stuff I forget (probably the most likely reason of all), or maybe it’ll be because I want to talk about it in the context of a larger story (the reason I never mentioned my “indoor walking track”), or because of some other reason (like the migraine because I felt so bad, and because it also wasn’t part of a larger story).

In the future, then, I’ll continue to leave out far more than I share, but that won’t always be on purpose. The reality is that will always be some untold stories, regardless of why that is. But, they’re mine to with as I want, and that includes ignoring them. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.