in december, this journal will have been going on for six months. i am impressed and proud of myself. never have i managed to keep journaling for so long, even though i wanted to. i am sure there are many reasons for this, one of which being that there is actually an audience that WANTS to read (hi, masaka!). but that isn't all of it. nor is it that i have a more exciting life now than before; i have always lived something of a chaotic or soap opera life (take your pick). my mother has divorced twice (once when i was 6 months old, the other when i was 13), i have moved once for every year i have been alive (minimum) and only recently have lived longer than a 6 months to a year in a single place, i was dating when i was 13 (if you can call it that), got seriously and deeply involved with the occult in high school, have a mother who is a diagnosed paranoid-schizophrenic (one day i'll discuss that), have been married twice myself, have four kids and one is multi-differently-abled, and so much more i can't even begin to list it all. new challenges coming down the line are nothing new to me, i'm used to it almost. yes, i'd love a quiet life that actually makes sense and with a lot less challenge involved, but i also know it isn't happening. i probably wouldn't know what to do with myself if i lived a nice, quiet, "normal" life. and it sure would make the journal a lot less interesting. who wants to hear about the same thing day after day?

i also don't think the key to this journal's survival is age. i suppose i can blame the easy distractibility of youth for many of the journal's i started (most lasting less than a month), but the last journal i started as an adult in the aftermath of my first divorce. i used it mostly for venting, wrote in it maybe once a week for a couple of months. then somewhere along the line it became, well, a wish list of sorts - furnishings i needed and costs of places i was considering buying from, budgets, and so on. it quickly died a quiet death. other than rantings and the occasional price list, it really had nothing in it. not a baring of the soul or the exploring of my feelings. experiences and beliefs that this one has become. it was boring. and i suppose that is a difference right there. this journal is not a reiteration of what happened today with the blow by blow of a highlighted conversation thrown in. while i do and have vented on here upon occasion, this is not its primary purpose. and if i ever make a price list as an entry, i invite you all to tell me it is time to take it down.

a big difference is the "where". in a way, this whole site is a journal, a scrapbook. this place expresses me, in the many shades and colorings of who i am. my experiences are recorded here, either in actual words as can be seen in me at midnight, insights & inspirations, eloquence and beloved mine, just to name a few, or a visual record of what i have learned as seen in DominoDesigns, or in the scrapbook form of my net sisters and loth dedications. these are as much a part of my journal as whyspered moments. they share my experiences, who i am, what i feel, what i think, what i believe, what is important to me. and these experiences are not just on the net. the friendship shared in net sisters and tsf is just as valued in real life as on the net. maybe even more so as i do hold a small amount of skepticism for online relationships. we cannot be sure that anyone is who they say they are, but that is most especially true on the net where we can't SEE the person, hear the tone of their voice, look into their eyes. my writings found in eloquence and from my heart, among others, more often than not start in real life, whether coming from deep emotion or imagination, or as part of my educational experience. this whole site is my place to express and explore who i am. whyspered moments is just a natural extension of that.

in a way, the anonymity helps too. yes, there are a few people who know me in real life who read, and i have many net friends who also read. but the vast majority of my visitors i don't know. their judgment of me and my own kind of craziness isn't personal, at least not as personal as my real life journals were. i am and probably always be my own worst critic. many times a journal entry just reinforced how stupid i am or took a big mistake and blew it all out of proportion and banged me over the head. i have, fortunately, grown beyond my own self-hatred, but it is still too easy to tear myself up one side and down the other for the smallest of things, especially in private. being public like this actually forces me to step back and try to see things a bit more realistically. oh, i still use my own belief and visual filters as i view the world and my experiences, but i have to be more honest with myself about it anyway. it is hard to trash yourself when you KNOW the next day in your mail or on icq you will be bombarded with how harsh you are being to yourself, what a good person you are (with examples even!), and so on. true, they also are peering through their own filters. but as "outsiders" to whatever situation i am musing on, they have a much more objective view. knowing that forces me to at least TRY for one myself. yes, the audience is a big reason this journal is still going.

writing here feels natural to me. writing in a notebook or diary never did. i am online almost every day, i do not necessarily pick up pen and paper every day. and even if i do, it is often for something assigned. it is hard to switch from "assignment" to "journal" mode. but when i am online, working on my site, or anywhere else on the net, there is a natural shift for me. i often do two or three things at once when online, one of which is reading others' journals and blogs. this makes it easy for me to post in m@m and often puts me into the mindset to write in whysper.

and this place on the net will always be around in some form or another. if i lose my space, i have everything on disk, on several of them as a matter of fact. if there's a fire, it's still online. this place is harder to steal from me or to have destroyed (although, admittedly, not impossible, so don't see that as a challenge!). in the past i have had fire destroy everything i own and my mother's problems lose everything i owned at least twice. as a girl i had a brother who got into everything i had and left me little privacy, as an adult i have children that often do the same. whyspered is not private, so i don't feel violated when someone reads. it is safe from fire and my mother's shenanigans. while not completely safe from destruction, it is safer than anything i have ever had in the past. and that. probably more than anything, helps keep whyspered moments going. and what i share here will not be erased, even should the site itself disappear. the people who have come by here and read and explored carry it with them when they leave. and that is something that just can't be duplicated in a private, notebook journal. that is what helps make this more real than any other journal i have ever tried.

and being real, as real as i can be, is the one thing i aspire to.