Or, Half-truths.
There are many people who would probably assert my status as a very open, genuine individual. Mostly, though I have an artillery of personal details I am ready to share with pretty much anyone, which would lead others to believe that my life is an open book, waiting to be read. I am happy to share with anyone who asks facts about my mom’s former alchoholism, my parents’ divorce, the number of deaths I’ve experienced in and outside my family, my many, minor, humorous mistakes, my feelings of being frustrated, overwhelmed, directionless, and depressed, and my infinite opinions about nearly eveything. I will not, however, willingly divulge details of my love life, or lack thereof, big, still-painful, not-so-funny mistakes, my inherent feelings of worthlessness, feeling consistenly out of control, or the fact that I have a huge amount of creative ambition and no idea how to follow through.
A big reason why I started blogging in the first place is to be able to express all the things going on in my head. My blog has never had any guise of anonymity, and I wanted to be as authentic as possible with what goes on within me. I have found; however, that with a lack of some sort of mask, it has become difficult to share my innermost thoughts, even, and perhaps especially when the primary followers of this blog are my very close friends and my mom.
This feeling that I perhaps am not ready to reveal every thought and feeling within me is compounded by the fact that I have set my blog to upload to my facebook notes, where my extended family, acquaintances, youth, parents of youth, coworkers, and people I might find reason to write about can read my notes. I thus am limited in describing how I feel about my family relationships, my work relationships, my ministry, my friendships, my more-than-friendships, and anything else I wouldn’t want one of my youth or an aunt to read. On the other hand, more than one person has expressed to me that they found my blog through my notes, and enjoy reading what I write, and as an aspiring writer, I can’t deny that posting my thoughts on a social networking site has increased the traffic to my blog.
So, I am not really sure where this leaves me. I yearn to be completely honest about all the experiences and resultant feelings that I have, but I also am not keen on the idea of everyone I have ever met seeing my most vulnerable spots, even of it may broaden their insight of myself and others. So, in my case, what would you do, what have you done, what are you doing? How do you both seek to protect yourself and be publicly authentic with who you are? What do you suggest?










