Going Public

Some of you may have noticed that links to my blog posts now show up on my Facebook page. In fact, according to a very cursory glance at my blog statistics, most of you are reading this because you saw a link on my Facebook page (hi friends! welcome!).

A lot of bloggers add an RSS feed of their blogs on Facebook and it seems like to many of them it ain't no thang.

Except it is totally a thang.

"Make blog Facebook appropriate" has been on my to-do list for probably 2 years now. I would put it on my actual to-do list, let it sit there festering for awhile, take a look at my old blog posts, freak out, and then remove it. Rinse and repeat.

It's not like my blog has ever even been all that inappropriate. Aside from some cursing it's not particularly vulgar, and while in my 11 years of blogging I certainly have a history of talking about copious amounts of drinking, even that has slowed down as I head into old age.

I think any personal blogger can relate to the fact that there is a certain level of paranoia that can come with knowing that people are reading your shit. I never experienced this paranoia when I had my business blog because frankly, I don't care if you enjoy my discourse on the difference between the Dow and the NASDAQ. But when you put your own personal stuff out there, you may as well be giving people access to...everything. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had those moments where someone mentions something they read on your blog, and you had no idea they knew it existed and you sort of blanche for a moment before realizing that, um, this is kind of what you signed up for.

Some people learn this lesson the easy way, by having a friend mention a totally innocuous blog post when you didn't know they were one of your readers. And some people learn it the hard way, by almost getting kicked out of business school for blogging (truthfully!) about your program.

Unless you're really adept at keeping yourself anonymous, there comes a point where every blogger needs to say to themselves, "Why am I posting stuff for people to read if I don't actually want people to read it?" What I mean is, it seems totally illogical to have had a series of blogs all these years yet somehow try and preserve this arbitrary distinction between the people who read it and the people who don't. "Real life" friends have always had access to my blog, just not necessarily all of my real life friends. But there was never really a rhyme or reason to it.

So a few weeks ago, I cleaned up my act. I deleted a whole lot of posts, saving some of them in a Word document. I committed to using this space for more appropriate, will-not-get-me-in-trouble-or-embarrass-me content. I also committed to using this space not solely to chronicle my life, but as a place to actually do some real, thoughtful writing. The kind of writing that, if you're someone like me and you need to write to keep yourself sane, is fulfilling. Because even if it's a stupid blog post about why you decided to add your blog's feed to your Facebook page, it's still something you put effort into as opposed to just saying, "here's what I did last weekend."

It's scary, to be honest. I have less control over who reads my blog now than I ever have, because even if only 5 people click over here from a Facebook link, I have no idea which 5 people those are. Maybe it's my besties, or maybe it's some random person that I only met once at a party and will never see again (still, either way, hello!). But it's one of the few ways in which I'm starting to exercise some maturity.

Maybe one day I'll even get to the level of not cursing on here.

Eh. Fuck that.