Keeping my own counsel

I've had quite a few emails and phone calls of late from concerned friends, asking if I'm ok, and saying that they're worried that I've been so quiet recently. They know, you see, that we're having a crap time, and wonder why I'm not behaving like my normal self, and picking up the phone to call them with daily/weekly updates on our tale of woe.

Let me first say that it's not personal. My friends are still my friends, and you mean a great deal to me - it's just that, at the moment, I'm in a slightly altered state.

The thing is that, to be honest, I just don't feel like talking about everything. I feel like I run over the issues we're dealing with - my husband's redundancy, and my infertility - over and over in my mind as it is, and speaking about it out loud doesn't seem to help. No matter how many times I recount the number of airlines which aren't recruiting, or the results of my latest medical test, none of it is going to get any better. Increasingly, I prefer to ignore it in conversation, and chat about other people's problems, and not my own. That way I can pretend for a few minutes that the problems we're dealing with don't exist.

Which is odd behaviour really for a person who usually has so much to say.