This is a kind of confession and explanation. I had a discussion last night that got me thinking about why I find it so worrisome to have my “real life” friends read my posts, and why I prefer sharing random thoughts with people that I don’t really know.
After mulling this over for a bit, I now realize that it started when I was in high school…
I had a friend who introduced me to blogging and design. She and I worked on some silly little web-projects that never really took off, mostly because we kept arguing over what the sites should look like and who our co-authors should be. As a result, we both started individual projects of our own, ultra-bright badly coded sites on geocities, but we were only 16 and experimenting with html, so what did it matter. This was also around the time that livejournal was the big social networking medium. We each had accounts, but I never gave much thought to who was reading my entries. In other words, I didn’t think she was paying much mind to what I was writing.
It turned out that she was.
I wrote an entry about a particular event and she took offense. I felt that I was only describing my experience of the event and meant no harm by it. They were my views and I was certain that I was justified in expressing them.
Well, that friendship ended badly.
That’s when I started censoring what I wrote, not sharing my blog(s) with friends, and made my journal friends only (only to later start a new journal altogether in an effort to get away from that part of my web experience).
As some people know, I shut this site down for a while and only wrote on my journal. But I like to write, and I think of this blog as a kind of narrative exercise, just as my book blog is an exercise in writing about books (after all, I have a Lit degree, I should keep it up).
Yes, my worry is somewhat irrational. I am still worried that someone might react badly to something I’ve written, and I would rather it was someone I didn’t really know.
marginalia and such 