Apologetics

Apologetics (Greek): to defend, explain, or justify a position, sometimes religious, often through writing.

I've been on hiatus for a year. It wasn't exactly planned, but the longer I went without writing, the more it seemed like I should be 100% behind my decision to return, if I did. (I am, by the way, returning. Just in case you wondered.)

One of the questions bloggers struggle with is "how much do I say?" When you're blogging anonymously, there's some more leeway you can take, as long as you're not giving away personally identifying information. When you're writing under your own name, everyone knows it's you. I've had people I know, who never comment on the blog, come up to me in person and say, "You know, I totally agree with what you wrote."

Um . . . what? What I wrote? Where? When? Ah . . . the blog.

I've gotten a lot of support over the years, for which I'm grateful. I've also gotten some nasty comments. I've been verbally attacked, on a very personal level, for what I've written. That's where I really had to take some time and figure out how much I was willing to say and how much I respected my own opinion.

Yup. That last part bears repeating. I needed to figure out how much I respected my own opinion. Sounds like a weird thing for a writer to say, but often we're a sensitive bunch, and even more often, until we're toughened up by editors and publishers and reviewers and critics and readers (if we ever are), we doubt ourselves.

For reasons I'm not going to go into here, it was only in this past year that I finally, really "got it" that I have an opinion, and that my opinion matters. Wow. It was a big revelation, believe me. It took a long time for me to go from "my critics are always right and I'm always wrong" to "I don't have to listen to them, or accept what they say. And further, they might be full of shit."

Oh yeah, I'm also learning how to swear.

So, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write about, but it'll be my take on life and Judaism and books and writing and anything else that strikes my fancy. And I reserve the right to delete comments that take aim at me. After all, it's my blog. And I count. (Yippee!)