The Secret Emotional Life of Bloggers

My brilliant privacy solution: I was thinking about starting an email digest of posts. In other words, I would email posts that I worry about having WWW exposure to a select list of email addresses (that you readers must provide me) in lieu of attempting password-protected posts or starting a new blog. I like the idea of having some sort of reader transparency….if I have an email address then I know who’s reading, and can somewhat control exposure. Right? I don’t know. Jury is still out.

I will lament again how I wish I blogs could be more personal and detailed and truthful. Some people like to use blogs as a sort of Trapper Keeper of daily thoughts and events, and that’s fine. It’s their prerogative, after all. I now some bloggers in real life, whose lives are much much more layered and complex than the one they reflect on computer paper. I guess I just want more sometimes, for myself.

There are several blogs that I read that have recently just dropped bombshells: Everything is fine, fine, fine; the typical ruminations of a woman in her mid 30s or 40s. A collection of the normal ups and downs of life, spliced with witty insights and funny commentary. Then, all of the sudden, there is a break in posting, followed in due course by the Final Post. The “I’m shutting this blog down” with a quick explanation that usually involves some awful blindside of a reason that was never written about, never hinted at, never discussed. I hate reading a book and not being able to finish the ending.

Blogs used to be so interesting because they were so honest, raw, and exposing of truths that were for so long forum-less. Finally there was a place for women to talk about, say, the horrors of infertility in detail. Or the difficulties of being an alcoholic mom who is trying to get sober. And the whole mommy blogger revolution, where moms were exposed as people who—horror of horrors—were sometimes annoyed, overwhelmed, horrified or left unsatisfied by the process of raising children. Who doesn’t like to read a blog from a person who is telling it like it is?

If I can’t discuss in detail my relationship with, say, my mother, then what good is a blog, other than to record some daily events? Yet, I can understand why we all self-edit, why we all hide what we hide. I do see how one-sided blogging is, and how unfair it might be to paint a portrait of another person without their portrait of me. But, hey, they can start their own blog, right?!

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get into all this again. I was going to write this post about the duality of the verb “to settle.” But that will have to be for tomorrow.

Pictured above: Haircut Number Two.