See, this is why I don’t blog personal stuff… much. Well not really since I just saw this and I’ve been blogging for a couple of years but recently I was actually thinking/wondering about posting more personal stuff, what the chances are that someone who has my email looks at what the hell the domain his and/or looks up my portfolio, then comes here. Or later on meeting all the “blog people” you hang out with, wonder what the hell it is and end up here? How can you write about meeting people if there are chances they might end up reading it?
8 Comments
i for sure will comment on that – this is a commitment.
later.
Agreed. It’s something to think about, isn’t it?
whoa! I better lay off the blogging, get out into the sunshine a little!
a cautionary tale…
I guess it depends on how comfortable you are with exposing yourself, with the level of privacy you personally need and, well, the kind of business you are in!
As far as I know, the producer I work with doesn’t visit my blog, but nothing keeps her from doing it since she knows about it. So I’m very careful about what I write when it concerns my work with her because she’s the only one providing me with work right now. It sucks not to be able to tell you some of the great stories that are work related, but hey, it would suck even more not to be able to pay for my Web hosting service because she’d get pissed at me and stop giving me contracts. I’m an adult. I make choices.
As far as personal stuff goes, I think there are ways to express yourself without being explicit – Karl could be seen as an example of this, depending on the interpretation of explicit, of course ;-)
You also have to be able to handle what you wrote about, react to people who confront you about it. I’ve seen many bloggers who write super personal stuff and get pissed at people they meet who want to talk about it with them. Hey, if you write something and it’s out there in public, learn to deal with it. If you didn’t want them to care you wouldn’t have made the diary public.
I think it’s easier to blog very personal stuff when you haven’t met the readers. Since I’ve met some people through Yulblog, I find that I censor myself more. See, I might feel like sharing very personal things sometimes, moods, fears, whatever, but then I don’t necessarily want to talk about them. I don’t want to be asked “are you feeling better” the next time I hang out with bloggers. So I either don’t mention it, write something more obscure, use a quote from a writer or a poet (my favorite method!) or just get together with a good friend and talk.
The very sad thing about this video is that the guy feels like he has no other outlet to express himself then the Web. No friends close by, no other art form he can use. That’s the dangerous part, putting all your eggs in one basket. You wanna give the guy a big hug and take him out for a beer, though what he truly needs is a great therapist. But hey, don’t we all.
no trackback? anyway, long post about justin hall here.
Nope, no trackbacks. I’m using Textpattern and he doesn’t seem to believe in it. Excellent post though.
I think that you have to be very egocentric to post about personal stuff, and I don’t mean that in a denigrating way. I just mean that you have to be somewhat comfortable with yourself and believe in honesty. You can’t be afraid of what people might think of you, or what you may think of people. Actually, you can be afraid, you just have to be willing to experience the fear. I don’t know if it’s courageous or dumb, but I think that my life isn’t worth living if I don’t let people know who I really am, and what my true innermost thoughts are. People may think that they’re responsible for other people’s reactions…but we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and emotions fundamentally because they only spring from us and they are our own ‘reactions’ to what we experience of Life. So if I speak my mind on how clumsingly this girl acted in this one particular interaction…though she may feel hurt, I don’t think we’re responsible for that…we’re just people expressing our reactions. Now, if you are engaged in those social games where you are dependant on a person in particular to the point where if you were to express your true honesty you may ‘lose’ an important relationship, then I think it’s important to acknowledge this codependancy and just be able to live with it. As Martine said, we make choices, and it’s our conscience in the end whether we show our true selves or go about with a facade…it’s a very interesting problem, because I think I reach at point at times where I don’t feel a need to express how I think this person is an asshole, or this guy is stupid , etc. If someone asks me then I think I’ll prolly tell them how I truly feel if that’s what they’re asking…but I think that as you grow older, this desire to express the way most people affect you sorta fades…unless your reaction to this particular person is very intense, then your emotional scale is high up and you could run to the nearest cafe to reaise some blogging hell…I like that.
My advice to this guy… get some rest, unplug and go play outside. ;)