“Blind monks examining an elephant” by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724).

For a while, I thought nobody was reading my 90 Posts in 90 Days series of blogs. Then I started getting comments from Facebook friends and relatives. Then my husband mentioned he was a few posts behind. Then my mom told me she loved it.

Hi, everybody! I’m glad to have all of you here, reading. However, I’m also slightly worried, that I’ll either a) start using every conversation with you as fodder (“Writers are always selling somebody out” — Joan Didion) or b) edit my current experiences and conversations out of my writing.

I don’t think selling others out is actually at stake. My friends and family are hearty people and I treat them as well as I know how. I do think that if an experience happens to me, I co-own that experience and have certain ownership rights. Not entirely sure what they all are, but that’s okay. Talking about my life is fair game.

It’s more about my own privacy as I work out what’s going on in my head, and about waiting until I have a fix on something, a temporary orientation that functions as certainty would if I believed in that sort of thing. What one might call “truth.” I find myself striving more and to come up with inarguable phrasing, which is a dangerous ideal if ever there were one. Writing and publishing quickly is not about either certainty or legalistic defenses, but it is about saying something worth saying, and the truth seems to me worth it.

Yet truth has different colors and shapes and shadings. And textures. It’s all blind people and elephants out there, and I want to make sure I’m describing the thing I feel, even if I don’t know it’s a trunk, ears, or dung.

One truth: I’ve been feeling tired lately, both physically tired (a little worn down from my vacation) and tired of the sound of my own voice. I have exactly two weeks left, including today, to write and post every day. You may be asking, “What will she think of next?”

You’ll be the first to know.