Wherein the lady might protest too much*
August 14, 2006
Sometime last week I received an email from the guy I was concerned about here. Let�s call him...Gameboy.
Anyway, I was pretty happy to hear from him, and I think in my response I might have weirded him out a little? Gameboy, if I weirded you out know that I was drunk when I wrote back to you. Yup, that�s my excuse and I�ll stick to it as much as I stick to anything else. (So, not very much.)
Anyway, anyway, Gameboy asked me a question I often ponder as someone who considers herself a fairly (though not extremely) private person: aren�t I worried/scared/concerned about disclosing so much about myself in such a public forum? (I.e. this diary which, considering the fact that I have about 5 steady readers, is not *that* public, but whatever.) My answer to that question would have to be: sometimes. Sometimes I actually feel physically ill and anxious about things I�ve said here. The follow-up answer to that question would have to be: I do not think that I actually disclose that much about my life here. I tend to disclose the stuff on the surface of my life. Either things in the present which I consider throwaway, or things which happened far enough in the past that it does not bother me much to discuss it now. The stuff which I would probably feel comfortable talking about if I were hanging out with a bunch of people I only know a little bit.
Maybe this has to do with the fact that I do not take romantic relationships or other situations that seriously until there is something to be taken seriously. At which point, you will probably stop hearing about it. I do not mention my family very often, even though they are a huge part of my life here. And with the exception of past comments I made about PG, how often do I really discuss my friends and my relationship with them in detail?
I started this diary as a place to vent. The reason I decided to go public with my venting is because I was also trying to work on another issue I have had with varying severity for a few years, and that is expressing myself publicly. There was a time when I would get choked up and/or nervous anytime attention was focused on me. While I see nothing wrong with being a private (or even extremely private) person, I did sometimes wonder if the reason why I was so shy about being a center of attention was not JUST because I�m a private person, but because I am a private person who additionally thinks that nothing she has to say is of any worth to anyone.
I am not sure I have yet come up with an answer to this question. I mean, I do think I have worthy opinions, and I do in general think I am worthwhile person, but I do not know whether this diary has actually helped me to ascertain that.
This was never meant to be a place to keep my friends updated on my life. In fact, I never intended for any people who actually KNOW me to read this, but I eventually gave the URL to two close friends and told them not to tell anyone about it, and they apparently forgot and told people about it, and well after that I figured, �Eh, what the hell�� and started being a little less exclusive with who I gave the URL to, but until recently stuck to the principle that I would not give the URL out to anyone who lives here, in Egypt. Not only that, but with the exception of PG and Mini, no one here is even aware that this diary exists.
The funny thing is, as more and more people I know started to read this it became less of a place to vent, and more of a place to talk about events. I kept trying to figure out how to balance between writing about my life, and comfortably writing about my emotional life. Who I see and what was said is not as important to me as how I feel. Ultimately, I decided that this place is no longer somewhere I feel comfortable discussing big, bad feelings other than in the abstract. Maybe that�s what I mean when I say that for all the words written here, I do not feel like I disclose that much about my life.
So�do I sometimes worry about the fate of this place and the information disclosed here? Yes, definitely. Has this diary strayed from its original purpose? Absolutely. But it has ultimately become an interesting experiment in discovering the boundaries between my public and private self. Sometimes, when perusing older entries I�ll find a sentence, a word, or more often an entry title that will say so much more about what was going on than the entry as a whole. I count on the fact that my readers won�t always read between the lines, so that I can write between them. Sometimes this is a public record interspersed with private code, and sometimes this is just a tale told by an idiot, seemingly full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing*.
Overall though�despite occasional misgivings and anxieties�it has been a good experience for me. Thanks for being a part of it.
* This entry brought to you by the subliminal prevalance of Mr. Billy Shakespeare.