Privacy — or the lack thereof April 19, 2008

The visits to my humble little blog have increased dramatically lately, when the last post (Small Town People Are Bitter — Get Over It) was cross-posted at TheSeminal.com, a political blog produced by my friends that appears to get a fair amount of traffic. I didn’t think about having The Seminal link back here until my friend Jason did it, and I’ll have to admit it scared me a little at first.

Some of the posts here are quite personal, but there’s some relative anonymity in just throwing a blog up on the internet. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come — it takes a lot of effort to make your blog stand out from the millions and millions of other blogs out there. Nobody’s going to wake up overnight and be Dooce or Penelope Trunk — it took a lot of hard work for them too to make their blogs prime internet destinations. (And I’m sure the daily traffic that I’m now talking about is what they get in five minutes or less.)

After the mad scramble to re-read some of my prior posts (it didn’t take long), I realized that I didn’t care so much any more. I’ve reached the point where if you know me, a lot of this stuff is going to come out pretty quickly anyway. Last night, at a friend’s birthday party, I met some new people, and told them about my divorce, moving across the country, my current relationship status, and my sex life. That wasn’t an overshare, either, in the context of our conversation — they were telling me about their own relationships, jobs, marriages, etc., in a similarly detailed way.

My ex-husband is unlikely to find this online — he just isn’t an online person (but you never know, I guess). But my recent ex-boyfriend is now on Facebook and Twitter, which means that he’s probably already found this or is likely to find it very soon. Part of the mad scramble was to see whether I said anything on here that I hadn’t told him to his face. Because that’s the danger of blogging and the Internet: it gives people false courage, and some misuse their ability to say whatever they want by saying what they don’t have the cajones to say in person.

And while there’s a therapeutic value, certainly, in being able to share with a mass audience of “friends” what’s going on in your life, and for the major bloggers, it certainly brings in the traffic and page views, I think you have to be careful not to cross that line and say hurtful things just to make yourself feel better. When you’re in pain, your instinct is to lash out, with ever fiber of your being and every tool at your disposal, and if it just so happens that one of your tools is a blog read by a bunch of people, it takes remarkable restraint not to let some of the anger and bitterness creep in.

There was a New York Times article this week about bloggers who have talked about their divorces, which included the aforementioned Penelope Trunk (who is now Twittering). I guess I’m lucky in that, as painful as my divorce was to me, we never reached the level of bitterness that the article discusses. Sure, there are days, even still, when I want to impose on my ex some of the hurt he has imposed on me (mostly when I think about my financial situation and the fact he has now gone completely AWOL in dealing with it), but mostly, I want my life to be free of that pain. And for me, escalating things on my blog (regardless if 5 or 5 million people read it) isn’t really where I want to go.

I’d much rather blog about new and exciting developments in my life. But they involve other people too — people who read blogs — so I’ll just leave it at that. After all, it’s obviously hard enough restraining myself in person.