Estrangements, the blog and the website, is primarily about estrangements in families between blood relatives. It is less about the estrangements between former lovers, even though that is such a common form of estrangement.

What brought me to creating the website, Estrangements.com, were the estrangements between myself and blood relatives and, secondarily, other estrangements in my life.

Estrangements, the website, has lists of links to information about celebrities and others who have experienced
estrangement, links on information about psychological conditions
that can be catalysts for estrangement, links to support and discussion
groups, lists of books, movies and online articles on the topic, a
poetry page, and the blog from 2001 to 2005.

The blog includes my own story of family estrangements and my writings on
various issues that relate to estrangement. My own story is just that,
my own story. Others in my family have their own stories and their
stories differ from mine. I don’t know the
internal lives and perceptions of the others in my story even if we
once were close and even if we thought we all knew each other
well. Even if we were currently on good terms, I wouldn’t know what it is like to be them.

We are all encased in our own skin and can’t know
exactly what it is like to see through the eyes and walk in the shoes
of another person. We can try but it is impossible. Great novelists can
be good at it but still, no one really knows what the exact interior
life is like of another. We can guess. We can approximate. We can hear
it described. We can extrapolate from our own experience but we never
really know. So we can each tell our own tale but if we dare to try to
tell another’s, then we had best tread lightly because we operate with
incomplete information.

As for my other writings and
drawings in the blog, they are my opinion and my expression of themes
of estrangement. The cartoons are not meant to be a specific person.
They are cartoon drawings of human beings caught
in the drama of being human. The characters in them are generic and are based on my life
experiences, on stories I have been told, and on composites of people in
the roles that they live.

In May 2007 I began writing the Diary of An Ordinary Woman which is not
specifically on the topic of estrangement but is about a person who is
estranged. The person happens to be me. Since I was writing the Diary of an O.W. almost daily, earlier posts on the topic
of estrangements were buried from view. Consequently, as of June 12, the Diary of an Ordinary Woman is on its own blog. I deleted all of the Diary posts from Estrangements except for the Deere post and have provided a link to the Diary blog here on the Estrangements blog as well as a feed to recent Diary posts.

I have more than one reason for writing the Diary of an O.W. I give one reason in the first post of the Diary.

I have encountered other people’s baggage many times in the last 12
years of writing and talking with people about the subject of
estrangement. I have been impressed by the amazing ability of people to
jump to conclusions about me and others whose similarities to their own
estrangement are the facts of being estranged and their position in
their family. They jump to conclusions that are colored by their own
experiences.

Subjective assumptions are part of human nature. We do the best we can
with what we’ve got. We use our own experiences, limited as they are,
to develop ideas about what is happening in the world. We try to make
sense of things and we use our experiences as our source material. The
more emotion attached to the story that we are trying to make sense out
of, the less objective we’re likely to be. The more we identify with
some of the people in the story, the less we are able to identify with
those we see as "the others". The more we see similarities through age,
role, physical resemblance, gender, position in the family, education,
disability, and other traits, the more we make assumptions about
everyone involved including those who we think of as "like us" and
those we think of as "like them".

The best way to know another person and to know what makes them tick is
to walk in their shoes but that is an experience we can’t do. If
someone has a high ability to empathize and has had similar
experiences, then they can have a better idea of what it might be like
to be another person and can draw more accurate conclusions. But who
has the time to go around studying others in such detail? Who really
cares that much? When do we know if we are being conned?

To understand a situation completely, we’d have to be able to empathize
with everyone involved and put our own subjective assumptions away. If
we could do that, then we’d qualify to be the most perfect therapist
who never existed!  Not even great therapists are able to put away all
of their subjectivity and baggage.

So I concede that eliminating the baggage of my visitors is something
that I can’t do. I can draw cartoons about baggage. I can write about
baggage and my thoughts on it. I can think about creative ways to
portray the concept of baggage and how we can make subjective
interpretations but I can’t eliminate it. I concede that I can’t win
that fight But maybe I can make an inroad here and there through my
efforts.

The only ones who can eliminate baggage are the ones who carry the
baggage and they have to realize that they are carrying it before they
can begin to shed any of it. So along with my cartoons and my other
posts on baggage, I write about myself as an Ordinary Woman because
that is what I am. I am just Ordinary.

I am through and through Ordinary. I am not superhuman nor superweak. I
am not a therapist, not a mindreader, not able to discern what someone
says who doesn’t tell me things. I am not able to do superhuman things.
I am not able to be perfect. I do not know all things. I am not only a
mother, a daughter, an ex-wife and a wife but I have a life. An
Ordinary Life but a life. Like other people who come here to this site
who are pretty Ordinary too.

When I use the word Ordinary, I mean it in a nice way. By Ordinary I
mean someone who doesn’t have extraordinary abilities, extraordinary
mental illnesses, extraordinary mean streaks. I mean someone who is a
generally good person who wants to live a life that means something,
someone who would rather do good than bad, someone who tries to do
their best, someone who would not go out of their way to hurt anyone.
Someone who doesn’t deserve to experience pain but who experiences pain
because in an Ordinary Life there is pain as well as good times.

When visitors come to my site, I want them to know that I am indeed
Ordinary. And that estrangements happen to all of us, even Ordinary
People. It would be great to be a SuperHuman and be able to solve all
things but then not even Superman was able to do that.

Whomever you are and whatever caused you to visit this Estrangements
site, I hope that any estrangements in your life work out for the best
for you. That whatever solution you find, that it is one that allows
you to live a productive, meaningful and satisfying life. I wish I
could provide the answers that you are looking for but I’ve found that
one constant truth for me is that if answers exist, they vary for each
of us and it is up to each of us to find them.

I wish you the best of success in finding your answers and that the outcome of finding them is a positive one.

Ginny