Return to Negative Space 

Back when this blog was new, I wrote an entry about the concept of negative space.  At the time, I was thinking about how the outlines of a job (or even a career) can give a shape and a form to a person as they are viewed from the outside, but how misleading that form may be.  As I was unemployed at the time, I was also thinking about how being unemployed both gives an impression and lacks an impression at the same time.  There is a bit of a void there - no tidy answers to "what are you?" and a host of potential assumptions (many of them negative) about "who are you?"  

I had a conversation the other day with Marie, and she commented that it didn't look like I had been knitting lately.  "Actually, I have," I answered, and mentioned I had various projects on the needles, a springtime Ribby Cardi about to be complete, several socks ready to warm cold feet, etc.  Engrossing projects, all of them, I just hadn't felt much like writing about them.  There's a whole lot of my life that isn't out here on the 'net.  

I started thinking again about negative space, and how a blog can create that sense as well.  Eunny talks about it here also: 

I put very, very little of my personal life up here, and it always sort of astonishes me to see the kind of assumptions people can make and what sometimes seem like disproportionate reactions. I can see, though, how and why that happens - so if I can't learn from it, I just try to shut my eyes (besides, what can you do? You can feel sick for a minute and then try to get over it, or beat yourself up, or try to fix it or backpedal or retaliate and make a bigger mess all around. The first option leaves the smallest footprint - I'll take it).

I have far more of my life here, but I think that if the sum total of my personality and life experience was what is available for public perusal in this forum, I would be living a pretty empty life.  I haven't had the sort of wholesale assumptions made about me in my comments that Eunny and others I have witnessed have had, but I have had my words twisted to the worst light in another thread I don't frequent so often anymore, and the assumptions that had to be made about who I was in order to complete that verbal wrenching made me out as a pretty callous, awful being.  It's why I don't enter many heated online arguments - the temptation by some to fashion a Guy Fawkes dummy in your likeness, put words in "your" mouth, thoughts in "your" head, and make this newly-created straw avatar dance like a leering, slobbering buffoon are too tempting for some, and I don't have the stomach for it. 

The last thing that got me thinking in this vein is the news.  I don't write much about current events, either - it doesn't mean I don't talk about them or think about them.  I simply feel others talk about them far more eloquently than I could.  But I do feel horror and sorrow when tragedy strikes, even if my pixellated outline doesn't show it.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones, readers.