Liz Baumann

I’ve been holding back lately.

The lack of blog posts is just one symptom. I started worrying about whether things I said might be offensive to someone. Not being able to grasp every possible reaction or viewpoint, a few times I’ve thought it prudent to just keep quiet. Don’t make waves. Then I realized I was also holding back things that weren’t offensive but just seemed trivial, or like I was repeating myself.

I’m seeing now that this behavior has bled into other aspects of my consciousness. I’ve been feeling a lack of confidence and am reconsidering whether everything I have been working on the past year has any worth. I’ve been making mistakes, which makes me feel like maybe I should be even more quiet. I’ve been considering returning to the practical form of existence that defined me for much of the past 15 or so years.

This all has me envisioning myself as silently clawing my way out of the rabbit hole and wondering if anyone will notice. Should I continue on up into the blinding sun? Or let myself fall back in? Is there a middle ground?

Somewhat aside from all this, I’ve been observing for months now what people I’m connected with say and comparing it with what I say or think or with what happens in my life. I frequently see correlations and synchronicities here and sometimes I point them out, directly or subtly. Many times the timing has been off in that things are said and later I realize they manifest. Since it happens quite often I’ve wondered whether we were somehow causing these things by saying them or whether the words are like a murky window on some preordained future.

But twice now in my time of personal censorship, other people still said what I was silently, seriously, thinking. This would seem to support the murky window hypothesis. I think…

Is this just an optical (or optimal) delusion? What is the point? Should I, can I, somehow harness this predictive power? Probably not if I crawl out of that rabbit hole.

But I’m still very sensitive about pissing people off. I don’t know if I can overcome that. Maybe I shouldn’t avoid it either.

If I’ve offended, confused or bored anyone, well, I call this blog my ‘public diary’; maybe you shouldn’t read other people’s diaries.