Writing about your problems on the internet

A little update

Hello, 17 subscribers. Long time no see. I have been meaning to write more, and I have several ideas for blog posts written down in my notes app that I think are at least somewhat good, and I also have had a bunch of free time lately. What I’m saying is, I don’t have any good reason to have so cruelly deprived all 17 of you from my prodigious writing for this long, but I am glad to finally put an end to this international nightmare. I will probably get to the more interesting stuff eventually, but for now all I can offer you is a second meta-post where I write on the internet about writing on the internet.

The pickle I feel I’m in

At my K-12 school, we got lectured a lot about our “digital footprint” and how important it is to maintain online privacy. Like, a lot. I guess this has made me feel like sharing personal things online is risky and thus made me kind of conservative about what I am willing to post. I mean, I share a lot of impersonal information online—projects I’ve worked on, some thoughts about random topics—but not that much about my personal life. Well, a lot of things I’ve shared online unequivocally count as part of my personal life, but they’re not anything that, to me, feels vulnerable to share. 

In contrast, there are a lot of people—some near and dear to me, some who I simply follow and cherish—who do post vulnerable stuff online. They talk about their problems, insecurities, mental health struggles, etc., and most of them seem, overall, pretty happy with the consequences of having shared it. Plus, I really enjoy reading people’s diary-esque blogs—Val’s Pals, Bookbear Express, etc.

I guess this is the closest I’ve come to posting something confessional like that:

Substack no longer allows tweet embedding so I hope you appreciate the effort it took to make this gif (2 mins)

There are clearly benefits to being super open online, from receiving validation from strangers to encountering and becoming friends with “your kind of people”, to even, on rare occasion, have someone think you’re cool and invite you to things or refer you to a job. I’m not sure if this is a similar enough kind of “being open online”, but I also see people advocating for “building in public” and say they’ve gotten a lot out of that, which seems related and worth mentioning. 

All of this is cool and exciting and very 21st century, so it’s tempting to say that the whole digital footprint thing is antiquated boomer fearmongering, but sadly there is probably some truth in it. Like, if I started writing a bunch about my mental health or whatever, there really is some chance that potential employers would see that and interpret it as a red flag. (Sometimes it gives me whiplash to remember that there is actually still a significant stigma around these topics in most circles.) And it does make me a little bit uncomfortable that anyone—including my parents, strangers at parties, and friends who enjoy making fun of me—could read what I post and ask me about it at any moment.

Me, personally

Do I have any super-fucking-vulnerable topics that I really wish I could write about but have been holding back from sharing due to these concerns? Well, not any one thing in particular, but this has certainly played a role in shaping my topic selection overall. I’ve discarded several blog post ideas because I didn’t want literally everyone I know to be able to read all that, and I also have heavily edited a bunch of my previous blog posts specifically due to the concern of “what if X person reads it”. I think it would be nice if I could be more unfiltered, and I think not having this filter would give me lots more topics to post about.

I guess this is why people have anonymous accounts and anonymous blogs. But that feels kind of against the point because I’m whining about wanting to be more personal. 

What am I going to do?

Probably nothing. I guess I will keep writing about topics that are fun to navel-gaze about but don’t feel especially vulnerable to talk about for me. I guess this was just mostly a rant. But hey, it’s my blog.

That said, I want to commit to publishing one blog post every other week. If you are reading this and notice I haven’t published in more than two weeks, please DM me on twitter saying that you have noticed this. There is probably only about a 20% chance that the reason I haven’t posted is that I am having some sort of mental breakdown, so feel free to ask some probing questions. Hopefully the possibility of this happening will be enough of a threat to keep me disciplined.