Blogging about blogging

Ever notice how prolongued hunger has the effect of actually causing you to lose you appetite? Your stomach shrinks a bit, and suddenly you realize that you don’t feel those gnawing hunger pangs anymore—or you do finally eat then realize you’re satiated by much less?

So goes my social life, as I have become more and more accustomed to being alone, spending each day in a similar routine of get-myself-through-hectic-polluted-Kampala-traffic-noise-and-home with the occasional bout of solitary exercise before or after, such as running through said smog-choked streets. And often throw in 40 minutes of reading at a quiet table during lunch, and there you have it—Holly in Africa.

I haven’t given up, completely, I just stopped caring so much. Yes, I am single, and—gasp--twenty-eight. I would love to find a meaningful romantic relationship, loyal, inspiring friendships, and a career that challenges and energizes me. Yet, no, I haven’t discovered that repeated excursions of binge drinking and banal conversation really stimulate my interest in Kampala’s social offerings.

On par with my new hermity self, I settled onto my bed, excited to zone out to two or three episodes of HBO’s Rome before going to bed. True, it might be fun to catch some of the European cup at a nearby bar for a 9:45pm kickoff as I almost managed to do… but that would involve leaving my bed.

I watched an episode and a half and got sucked into Facebook. That’s when I saw that a friend’s mother recently died of cancer. I had missed the announcements in the past week offering condolences and an invite to her memorial service. I’ve known this friend for over a decade, but we were never as close as back when we were little girls, chasing animals around in the barn or getting pulled through poopy mud puddles by her brother on a tractor.

It’s strange this world we live in, where you can get such an intimate glimpse into people’s lives without having to make yourself known. You can read someone’s diary online (ahem, cough, blogging) or just be a creepy stalker of your new boy or girlfriend’s old photos involving the opposite sex. We are so undeniably involved in the business of others, yet entirely removed and sterilized, so that we can easily go about our own selfish ways without ever truly giving of ourselves.

It was through the same power of Stalkbook months ago that I discovered another friend from high school had lost her new baby only weeks after its birth. I am no longer close enough to this friend to really have any business in comforting her, but shit, this virtual news makes me sad. It makes me think.  I am so fortunate for what I have been given in life and what I (hopefully) have left to experience.

But this life business aint easy.

People get their hearts broken. People suffer serious tragedy. No one escapes pain.

Some seem to ease their way through life, but maybe they are better at privatizing their problems rather than Tweeting their grief and “PinInterest”ing their strife. We throw up pictures on Facebook and other media forums demonstrating this plastered and imagined ideal of happiness—ahhhh life is all drinks and parties and trampolines and instagram colors of precious moments and confetti and cake and beautiful vacations and significant others and laughing.

But then, it’s not.

People’s new babies die for no apparent reason. People’s mothers depart this life well before their time.  People’s brothers and cousins go into rehab, they fight with their girlfriends, they get dumped by their cheating boyfriends, their parents divorce, their grandfathers die, and their dogs get run over by cars.

Yet we must persist, because, really, what choice is there? This pain that is so alarming when first confronted is also unifying, because in its essence, it’s what makes us human.
The lows in life allow us to truly appreciate and recognize the highs.

Experiencing one anothers' pain is a humbling and grounding force for acknowledging our own blessings in life—and appreciating them before it’s too late.

That said, I am missing my mom right now, and hope she knows how much I love her, even though we fight like newly introduced hens half of the time.

And I hope my friend who lost her mom is feeling loved by everyone else in her life, and knows her mom is forever watching over her as well.