Seeing the wood for the trees

Sometimes it terrifies me how much that google 'knows' about me:

Google search for 'relly'

This is because I spew out a non-too-selective lot of bile and crap in my blog and have been doing this in one form or another since about the tail end of 2000.
However, my blog has stopped being the medium of expression for me that it once was - I used it as a way of saying what I'd done and keeping up to date with other people's news after we had left uni and gone our seperate ways - and now I feel the urge to delete (or archive offline and then delete) lots of my posts from way back when.

I wrote about my depression as a depressed person would, you know in a kinda depressing way. I wouldnt want someone to dig it up in 5 years time and say 'jesus!'. Because obviously depression is indicative of a messiah figure.
I wrote about boyfriends, and anger, and old jobs and hopes that are now dead.

Now I wish to refine my writing. I love it but I have fallen out of practice into laziness, through laziness into not bothering, through not bothering into just not able to express myself creatively anymore. My well has dried up. Real life has stymied my creativity and cynicism, derision, fear, loathing, experience and hearsay (yes, the band) has stopped me reaching out and trying to 'be'. I don't bother to write. I find it hard to write for pleasure these days. I feel that I can't. I compare myself to others and fall short. I'm ashamed.

I marry the man i love next month (30 days time in fact) and I know I owe it to him to be more than a lady who lunches, or temps, or sits on the sofa all day. Just I'm a very bitter person when it comes to 'trying my best'. That is a whole other story. But it is why I must out the old and in the new. I feel very lonely and memories alone are not good company.

While my past writing about my life in 2000-2003 is doubtlessly 'a record' I increasingly have come to feel it is more like dried flowers: a reminder of something that was once alive, but not a true representative of the beautiful creation that the flowers were. You would not dry a poppy and say 'this is a poppy', it is a reminder of the poppy and the memories that the poppy evokes. Even if to you the poppy is the last remnant of a trip to the fields of Ypres to a passer-by it is just a dead poppy. This dead poppy is found by a passer-by on the web, taken out of context. I wish to write honestly but not personally as I have come to consider it as a hinderence. I feel the internet stifles honesty as much as it allows us to share experience.

I have perspective. My blog is not as horrific as the fields of Ypres. My experiences won't educate future generations. No-one needs to sap my strength and drink from my past misery and disappointment. I will share only what i feel is my best. I will delete all else. Learn from my mistakes. Write with thought and clarity and not emotional outpouring. I alone stand to decide the fate of the information. Internet, you may have these thoughts to share. I will keep the others. I don't want to preserve all my poppies.