So long and thanks for all the fish

And so Spanblather ends, and I think I ought to explain some of the why.

The slow down here started because I simply did not have much time or health to spend on blogging. When that situation improved I found I no longer had the inclination to write here, or indeed anywhere, as Span.*

The simple fact is that I'm just not Span anymore. Span was a part of me rooted in my student activist days and I've been slowly evolving away from that person for the last 18 months.

Several events have led me to conclude that there's no longer much Span in me these days, not least the impact of a disclosure of rape that was made to me last year by someone I love very much. I feel that the writing I have done here on the issue of rape and sexual violence, even before this disclosure, was not something Span would really have understood, certainly not something she would have been able to write about when she first took form in the late mid-90s. Sure, Span was involved in a radical feminist group for a while and felt strongly about the issues, but she could never really identify with them personally, it was always in the abstract. That's changed, for good or ill.

Similarly, my witterings about s59, motherhood, and sex were areas the original Span would probably not have ventured into - she was too busy running around campus because walking anywhere was just too slow, focused on the game-playing side of politics, rather than the day to day realities of life. The future always seemed like it would be glorious and full of radical activity. Span was a person who was always going to be young, in many senses of the world. The early Span would never have found domesticity at all fulfilling, or interesting. Sleeping was a resented task that would be done only when strictly necessary, and any second not spent doing something, anything, was a second wasted. Even when I had CFS that Span mentality still existed within the parameters of life dictated by the illness, which may be one of the reasons I was sick for three years.

Other parts of my life have changed too, and I'm happy with the new person I'm becoming, as Louise L Hay as that sounds. I feel constrained by Span now, instead of liberated. This pseudonym limits me rather than allowing me a forum to write about whatever I want without fear of being judged by those who know me in the real world**. Certainly I enjoyed surprising people who discovered my real identity when this blog was reasonably new, in particular those who had assumed Span was a man. Span was in many ways a sex-less entity, but that certainly hasn't been true of my writing over the last 18 months (partly because of the emergence of Capitalism Bad, which has inspired me in many ways).

Enough with the odd third person wankery. Thanks so much for reading and commenting and emailing and debating. For the most part I've found it stimulating and enjoyable. I'm particularly glad that there are now several excellent NZ lefty women bloggers out there writing about feminism and politics, notably Maia, Deborah, Tze Ming, jo and Anna. I look forward to reading their stuff and will probably still comment around the traps, albeit not as Span. Good luck to them, and also to my other imaginary friends; Idiot/Savant, Aucklander at Large, Just Left, Ghet, Make Tea Not War, Joe Hendren, those funny folk at Brain Stab, and the dear Frank Stupid.

I'm not going to delete this blog - I'm too vain about the good writing I have done to send it to trash. I'll allow comments for a while longer and then probably switch them off or put them on moderation - I'd hate for this site to become a spam farm. My spanblather email won't be cleared much, so those who use it may want to get in touch in the next week or so before I start ignoring it, so that we can maintain contact through other avenues.

And, because I can't end this last post on the banality of email addresses and spam, here's a quote from the wonderful, ineffable, DNA:

And, in an astonishing reversal of normal practice in the conduct of such matters, everybody concerned lived happily ever after.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the
chronicler's mind.

Cheerio
Span


* I admit I have been sorely tempted this last fortnight with all the National gaffes.
** Or stalked, or losing my job, or having people assume I am a puppet to my partner/party/employer/whoever when I clearly am not, or suffering any of the other ill effects that sometimes seem to affect the woman who blogs about politics under her real name.

(Pic Via)