wink     ; )

Thoughts on blogging

This post by Julie about transparencly and self-censorship in blogging prompted me to finally put into words some of my feelings about blogging.

I have a hard time with this blog. Part of that is because I don't have as much time as I would like to devote to it. But another part of it is that I am not truly anonymous here. Many people who read this know me, and know me well, in person. That's great in some ways, but it causes problems in others. Particularly, I censor myself a lot.

There are all sorts of things that I want to say but don't: rants and criticisms and embarassing stories. There are really intimate and personal things that, for reasons that I don't understand, I would rather share with a world of strangers than with the people who know me best.

Because of this (and my lack of time), I post infrequently or, at times, not at all. And when I do post, the posts are usually short and insubstantial (or very occasionally, cryptic).

But my dillema goes a bit deeper than just self-censoring. I find myself being deliberately boring here. I could post all sorts of fascinating yet insubstantial stuff here and not worry about the wrong people reading the wrong things. But instead I write stuff that I know is tedious and banal. I do this not just because I'm self-censoring, but because I'm actively driving some of my readers away. I know that if my post frequency gets above a certain level, or if my posts maintain a certain level of substance, then cetain friends/family members will actually pay attention to what I'm saying here instead of only dropping in thrice a year.

For reasons that I don't really understand myself, I don't want that to happen.

So I deliberately hobble this site. Sorry to those of you who want better from me here. I don't really know what a good solution is. I could go totally anonymous: set up a completely new blog and tell no one about it. I've considered this. But I'd be losing a bit too much (of what I don't know) by doing that. And I've thought about just saying what I want to--who cares if my friends and family know. I'm still considering this one. There are other ideas out there too, but none really strike me as approriate yet. So until I figure out what to do and get the guts to do it, this site will continue to hobble along as it has been--boring and tedious.

Sorry.