Wednesday, March 16, 2011

To share or not to share. That is the question.

Today's topic: When you blog, what's off limits? Why?

I thinks it's easiest for me to start answering this question by explaining why I first started this blog. This blog was started as a challenge between my sister-in-law who lives in North Carolina and myself. We both started blogs because we wanted to chronicle our lives and make it easy for family on the other side of the country stay current with what we're up to. Soon after, my other sis-in-law and some friends (here and here) started blogging too. Even my husband and dad and father-in-law blogged for a short while. (And yes, I'm linking to all of your blogs to guilt you into updating them.) :)


That said, the purpose of my blog is to update friends and family on what's going on in my life. But there is a lot of life that I don't want to share with them. I don't blog about fights with my husband. I don't blog about breastfeeding struggles. I don't blog about many personal issues. I don't blog about work either. And with the lack up updates I've been posting lately, I haven't been doing a good job of sharing the stuff I want to share either.

Sometimes I think I want to blog more about my private life and struggles. Lots of people do it, especially in this world of reality TV and mommy bloggers. I think it would breath new life into my blog and I'd probably attract more readers. But I've never made that leap.

The one thing that I've been fairly open about was my miscarriage. Writing about that experience helped my heart heal. And I love that my words on my experience has resonated with other women, and dare-I-say even helped them deal with their own similar issues. But even then, I didn't share the physical side effects, because really, who wants to know how bad the cramping was and how long it lasted. (If you want to know, talk to me privately. But I don't need to put it out there for the whole world to read.)

Sometimes I think I need to be more private. I use my husband's and my son's names. It's pretty obvious what my last name is. There is a lot of info that the wrong person could learn about me and my life, if they wanted. I actually have pseudonyms picked out for my family and an idea for a new blog name, but it's a huge project to go back through four years of blog posts and delete all references to our names. Maybe someday when I get some free time. lol.

So I guess in the end, my blog is a little lot lame. It's a balancing act of wanting to share more and being cautious of what I share, and I guess I'm tend to stay on the conservative side of sharing my life story. But it still getts the job done -- well, at least it gets the job done when I get around to updating it.

J.B.

1 comment:

  1. I think it's perfect! Well all except for that header..it's a bit out of date :) Let me know if you want me to whip up something new or if you are going to.. hee hee..luv u!

    ReplyDelete

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