I got my second vaccination shot on Monday, and it absolutely floored me. On Wednesday I took the dog out for a short walk around the town, and I came back out-of-breath and ready to faint. God. Meanwhile there was an Arts Council application to submit, which required hoops and hoops and more hoops, and finally it was submitted yesterday, and shortly afterwards I passed out. I woke up at midnight, to a notification that the mother-in-law had sent a friend request after joining FB.

Hello, boundaries?! We live in the same house for chrissakes. I tend to post random photos and asides. Now I suppose I'll never post. God, it's like a cop in uniform sitting down at your table, and you want to feel casual and make your usual jokes, but you can't really. I'm probably over-exaggerating. And I do have an okay relationship with the mother-in-law. But it feels like any privacy I have, any domain I carve out—even marriage!—gets consumed by her. I can't wait to build our house... which, rising construction costs in Ireland, may have to wait for several years. Le sigh.

I suppose I really shouldn’t mind this new incursion into this very fraught thing called my privacy. The ex-husband and my estranged brother used to (or still do!) read this diary. The ex, in the first tumultuous months of our separation, would send me critiques of my posts. And my brother told my mother I was a drunkard, based on lazy assumptions. Attempts to lock this diary were made; I thought what’s the point of keeping this online diary? I suppose it was to share musings with other people who have somehow made Diaryland their little outpost away from the exigencies of daily life. So I keep the diary public, regardless of who may chance upon it.

Anyways, you have to distinguish a life from a diary; living and the narrating of it are of course separate, however entangled. There were many times I wrote a post about some aspect of my life, and realised later that I had different ideas about it, or the memory of it was not quite settled, and already it was too late to amend, so it remained in my archive, as some impression, not quite right, but still valid in its own way, of my life: imperfect flowers of a shadowy garden.

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