Fear of the personal
This sounds silly from someone having a personal blog, but I’m sometimes having a hard time writing personal things on my blog. How ironic, right? I think this fear stems from having written a mountain of incredibly cringey personal things in the first incarnations of my blog, having made very complicated social experiences in the past, and to some degree, from where I’m from.
I used to write literally just what I was thinking in my blog between 2005 and 2008 (and also before that, but on a web 1.0 website rather than a blog). This was a completely disorganized stream of consciousness ranging from everything I did or experienced, to media I consumed, on to reminiscing. I was definitely not careful in what I wrote, and I learned the hard way to not do that when someone at work discovered my personal website (I had posted to show off something I made for work) and e-mailed it to the whole company. Needless to say I panicked and immediately took it offline as I saw that e-mail, and it never felt safe again to me. Part of my personal blogging experience died that day. The next 20 years, I took the utmost care to never let my colleagues know of my personal websites, and I also took way more care to think about what I write.
Today, I’m generally way more respectful about people in my life, as well as about my professional life. I would never write about my partner, my relationship or my friends without their consent. Which makes it hard to be really personal, but on the other hand, those are not really things I particularly want to tell the whole world1 about, rather those are things I probably talk to my close friends about when I meet them in person.
So what’s the point of having a personal blog if you can’t or don’t want to be truly personal? I sometimes wonder about that myself. For me, it’s a nice outlet for things I feel passionate about to share, topics I think that should get more attention, stuff like that. It’s also a great outlet for an introverted, socially awkward person like me to feel a sense of communication. The old web was amazing for that, because it was easy to find like-minded people and fulfill some kind of social need that’s always been hard for me to fulfill in real life. For an introvert, I’m a surprisingly social person and I enjoy meeting people and getting to know new people. But despite that, I’m having an incredibly hard time to make real connections with people, because I’ve been burned so many times in my life. But this has also a lot to do with where I grew up – a small, insular village of people whose mindset is stuck in the 19th century. I was an outsider there and I was bullied in school. Add to that a highly complicated family with little support (a narcissistic mother and a co-dependent father), and you’re on your own. I’m thankful I had a lot of pets2 that I loved dearly as I grew up, and later I found ‘my’ people on the internet.
Having been bullied led to me growing up always worrying about what people think of me, and this is one of the reasons why I’m having a hard time expressing myself sometimes. In addition, as I get older, I tend to have very little energy to argue with people. I have lots of opinions that I technically could share, but I don’t want to get into arguments. That’s why for example, I tend to avoid writing about political topics and my personal opinions on them, even though there are some that definitely vex me immensely.
So to summarize: While I would love to write more, and contribute to the revival of personal blogs and websites, there are many reasons why I find it difficult to write truly personal things on the internet in such a public space. Either way, I’ll try to blog more whenever I think about interesting things that don’t fit into a toot.
I know exactly what you mean. There’s so much going on in my life (although I actively want to write about mine) but doing so means sharing parts of my partners’ or kids’ lives. I wouldn’t want to do that without enthusiastic consent but that also means giving them the power to withdraw consent, but I don’t want to be in the position of writing posts that I might have to remove, or having to explain and justify myself before I have even fleshed out a post idea or … or or or, a hundred reasons! I can see why some people blog anonymously XD
Excellent point. Back in the old web, I definitely had an anonymous alter ego on the internet, and I really kept my real life and my online life separate as much as possible. Today I don’t really feel the need to do that anymore, on the contrary, my real life friends are the ones who would probably be most interested to read what I write (some of them at least). But indeed, it was great to have a void to shout anything on your mind into back in the day 😀
Hehe, what a coincidence. I was just thinking about the “good old times” of blogging, mainly because I’m currently reading a YA book where the main character reminds me a lot of myself when I was 17 (“Solitaire” by Alice Oseman – enough advertisment). And then I thought about you and your blog and wanted to check out what you are up to and it seems we were having quite similar thoughts. 😀
I sometimes miss those times, when blogging felt somehow cathartic. But as you wrote, I was also always torn between “I want to show people how I feel” and “no person that I know irl should ever find my blog or I will burn alive”. I sometimes use the wayback machine to look at my old blog posts and feel the cringe immediately. 😀
I created a new blog a few years ago because I missed those good old times – and there’s only one blog post there and I really can’t think of anything else to write there… Sad. The Internet doesn’t feel safe anymore since it’s a thing “normal” people use. XD
After I just wrote a letter I noticed that this is actually what I would’ve written on my blog 20 years ago. Wow, I wouldn’t dare to do that now, ever (btw, thanks for being such a great penpal :)). I think it’s also interesting how insensitive we were back then with information not just about us, but also about the people around us. But well, it kind of felt safe, maybe because the search engines were not that good back then?
I agree that it’s become a bit harder to think about what would be good topics for my blog. But one way to approach is, is to think about whether the things you’d write on a microblogging platform (twitter, mastodon, bluesky) would be better suited for a blog entry. Those platforms are basically what killed blogs in the first place, it was an outlet for your thoughts that was quick and easy, so instead of writing a longer blog post once a week, people started tweeting every day or so.
I really want to try to do that, but I still tend to toot stuff instead of turning them into a blog post, because it’s just so much quicker and more convenient… 🙄
But as you said, the *real* stuff, I write into letters nowadays 😀
I had misgivings about putting my real identity online, even when Facebook came along and insisted that everybody do so. After 20 years of “cancel culture,” it’s obvious that it was never a good idea, and never will be.
We didn’t have any trouble forming trust relationships with our online friends using just a screen name and an avatar back in the day. Nobody really cared who or what you were. A persona can build a reputation as easily as can an actual personage. It worked back then, and there’s no reason it’s not good enough now.