I started
this blog on a whim.
We had a private family blog, which the husband mostly
(or rather, practically exclusively) maintains and I occasionally contributed to and then concurrently in 2010 two
dear friends started their own blogs which, incidentally, I suggest you visit
cause they’re awesome: Nuts about Food and The Nero Chronicles. Their blogs
have a focus, a purpose, I had none, but I enjoy writing and I’m a “sharer” so through the power of imitation I started what pretty much amounts to a life blog.
I wanted
this blog to be anonymous, but as I said, I’m a sharer, so almost as soon as I
started it I shared it on facebook. Thus, though not popular by any stretch of
the imagination, this blog became not anonymous and is read, in part,
by people I know in “real life”. This has never really been a problem for me,
until recently. Sure, at times I found I would inadvertently censor myself or I
would think of a possible subject and then decide not to post it because it
would infringe on someone’s privacy, but it happened rarely and once I decided
not to write it I never gave it another thought.
I was always happy to hear of a friend or acquaintance that visited me here, I
felt it was a way to connect (albeit one-sidedly) to people in my life I rarely
get to see. And yet now, I sometimes feel restricted by this blog, I constantly
wonder whether I’m offending (I’m sure I am, with my anti-Italy posts), whether
I’m over-sharing, whether by talking candidly about my life I’m overstepping on
the right to privacy of the people in my life.
And so I
question whether it wouldn’t have been better to suffer the silence of blogging
just for myself while slowly building readership and, more importantly,
friendship in the blogging world keeping it separate from my “real” life, thus
concurrently protecting my family and maintaining a space for myself, where I
could just be myself, and write my
thoughts as they exist in my head rather than the version of our thoughts we
present to the world. Because despite how candid we think we are, how true to
ourselves we want to be, we inevitably censor, tone down, or up, or otherwise
modify our reactions, our words, our gestures and actions and expressions
depending on who we’re interacting with. It’s human nature.
On the
other hand, I wonder if blogging anonymously isn’t just hiding, isn’t being
ashamed, isn’t not wanting to own up to who we are. Isn't short-changing the very real, and very important friends one makes on the internet just because one hasn't met them in the physical world.
I’ve never really cared too
much about what others think of me. Of course, I can’t say I don’t care at all,
because that would be ridiculous, but I’m not overly concerned if someone
doesn’t agree with something I write, in fact, it’s highly likely that someone
won’t. But can I make that decision for the other people in my life?
Sometimes
I wish that I had a specific theme to my blog, a food blog, a design blog, an
arts and crafts blog (an impossibility, as I’m neither artsy nor craftsy) but
this is a “me” blog and I don’t live in a bubble. Also, I’ve got that whole
over-sharing thing going on.
I keep going in circles.
So the
lesson I learned from blogging? There are limits in everything we do, limits
imposed by society, limits imposed by our fears, limits imposed by our own good
sense, and sometimes limits imposed in what we write, about ourselves and about
our lives.
Can I live with these limits?
I’m not so sure anymore. So where does
a blogger go from here?
