Lisa Dempster has posed some interesting issues in a blog post around how personal and open you are on your blog.
There are swathes of things that go on in my life and my mind that I have chosen not to write about here. I don’t write about health, mental health or body image issues, for example. Nor feminism. Nor family. Nor other stuff that I think about or do. Because I control this space I can make sure it doesn’t get too personal – I choose what I want to reveal and what I don’t.
I agree that whilst a blog is a personal space, it’s up to the blogger on what you choose to reveal.
In this blog, I tend to only reveal two main sides of me, as a writer and as a socialist. There are others things about me that I could post about, but either I’m not so comfortable talking about it to strangers, even in some aspects within writing and politics, or they just aren’t that interesting.
I did post on this last year though, in an attempt to get more personal – as well as the other week when looking back at old blog posts and seeing how ‘raw’ I was.
One way that I have opened myself up though which I’ve been thinking about is the 365 challenge I’ve been doing. I started in August last year and am still plodding along nicely. The aim is take a photo everyday for 365 Days about some aspect of my life.
Of course, unless I was going to post a photo every day of me at my computer or on a protest and that was basically it, it was inevitable that the photos were going to reveal aspects of me that I wouldn’t normally.
At first I was trying to control what I photographed with the blog in mind. But if you’ve ever done the challenge, you’ll know it’s hard to think up new things to take photos of each day. They got more and more personal, which has made me a little nervous (see photo to the right for an example).
I guess posting the photos to the blog in groups, putting off posting them each day is a refection of the anxiety I felt about revealing some of the photos, but given that I’d already started, I didn’t want to stop and just post them to Facebook and not publicly.
Some may have noticed that when posting lots of photos, I sometimes only posted the first 3 or so on the main page forcing people to open to the whole post to see the rest. This was a way of shying away from being so public.
Though, as was discussed in the comments of Lisa’s post, I can agonise over posting the photos and often they don’t get noticed or commented on anyway.
I’d be interested to hear what people think about posting such personal things, especially if you’ve followed the 365 challenge.
