Staying on the Path

Got my anniversary notification from WordPress yesterday.  As I knew it was coming up, I had kicked around a few ideas for what to say but something interrupted that and I kind of spun off in a different direction.

No, I’m not pretending the last post didn’t exist.  Yes, I am going to talk about the future.  But I think my last attempt to explain the past was a bit garbled so I feel a need to try again.

I don’t know if I’ve ever explained why I decided to start this.  Well, back those five years ago, I just agreed to do my first Big Dance Event and I was looking for more information than Z and OwnerGuy were providing.  Something about liking to be prepared I guess.

So I cast a net on the internets (yes, that’s an intentional error.  It would be funny to my family) and hit on a blog that is now defunct.  It was a female student describing her first experience at one of these events.  Kind of blew my mind as she described the emotional overload.  Although nothing really prepared me for how much of an overload the real event was going to be.

Then I found a couple of other dance blogs including my fellow male blogger, The Thespian.  Ironically, he had just started his blog when I stumbled on to it.  OK, I now realize that I don’t really have a good why except that it seemed that there was a lot of good information out there and maybe I could add to it.

One little problem though.  See, I’m a classic case of “still waters run deep”.  There’s a whole cauldron of stuff bubbling up inside me despite my attempts to remain calm and sometimes unresponsive on the outside.  Since most of you haven’t met me, you don’t see that side.  I’m sure we all have things we don’t want to share but I’m really reluctant to open up to anyone so much of what I felt was bottled up inside.  And, it is fair to say that being a guy plays a part in that.  We aren’t supposed to be emotional wrecks.  We are supposed to be stoic at all times.

The illusion of anonymity was liberating in a way.  That plus a lot of time I never really did more than just sit with a starting point and let my mind ramble while I dictated it on the blog.  That lead to a whole bunch of stuff that was probably a little raw and stuff that would generally be embarrassing to me if people I knew read it.

Plus, the emotional tone of the blog was based on my particular emotional state.  If I was frustrated about something at the studio, the post reflected that.  If I was pissed off, the post reflected that.  It lead me to pop off and say things that could be hurtful if the subject of those comments read them.  I’m many things but I don’t want to hurt anyone if I can avoid it.  It also means that I probably contradict myself many times from post to post.  It is hard to explain but many times the point is to use this to help me figure things out so what you sometimes get are the intermediate steps as I figure things out.

I realized I was walking a fine line and I’m pretty sure there is at least one person I know in real life who has read something on here.  But, up until very recently, the responses were very supportive and safe and I guess it lulled me into a false sense of security.  In the back of my mind, I guess I was always concerned that someone would figure it out and send some kind of message to my studio “hey, you should read what this student is saying”.   That always seemed like an extremely remote possibility until the last comment.  Even though the person did say they would never tell, it is hard for me to trust an anonymous person on the internet who really didn’t seem to have my best interests at heart.

So, perhaps what I did was an overreaction but it does feel better that most of the more emotional posts are tucked away.  I guess I could have left more out there but I didn’t start getting bored with the process until I hit some of the later messages.

And where does that leave us?  I was concerned about continuing because if I have to censor myself, then would this be the same?  But I realize that for a variety of reasons, I already censor certain things and it probably isn’t that much of an effort to dial down the emotional venting about certain people.

Is there still value in continuing?  Yes, there is.  I frankly kind of enjoy rambling on like this since I don’t get a lot of opportunities to do so in the real world.  And, I like the connections I’ve made and seeing how their stories turn out.

So we go forward.  I think this is going to morph from being mostly about ballroom to a more balanced, general, “here’s what’s happening in my life” type of thing.  As long as I’m dancing, there will still be tales of dance.

I think there are ways to make some of the more private ones available to a limited audience of people I know I can trust.  And I will explore that further because I’m sure there are still going to be those times when I just have to vent but some of those will now have to be for a limited audience.

Then again, after five years, you do need to change things up so maybe this was all overdue.  But, since I’ve got nowhere else to go, I’m going to be hanging around on this site for the foreseeable future.