private life

I may actually enable comments for this particular article because it plays into why I do all of this in the first place: the feedback.

Over the last few years my writing here has centered on politics and technology, and the occasional rant about something that really gets my blood boiling.

For the most part I tend to avoid overly emotional subjects or personal issues such as personal emotional conflicts. I use my factual personal accounts and opinions primarily to keep my readers from confusing most of what I write here with an unbiased perspective.

Lately I've been motivated to write things of a more personal nature, and it makes me think more about why I write for the public and what effects my writing has on myself and other people.

I'm living with the people closest to me now and my correspondence isn't the emotional dialogue it used to be a few years ago. With my e-mail archives getting filled with boring minutiae, I worry that if I don't take my writing here to that next level that I'll never get to share that important part of my life and may possibly lose the memory of these days forever.

This is my outlet to the world, my ability to write something once and share its location with the people I know.

This is also an inadvertent way to spread information and my experiences to people I don't even know I have anything in common with.

- People who find my writings on a search engine often write to me with another perspective.

- People who reference my article in a web page allow me to see other interesting discussions about the topics I write about that I may have never seen.

This is a great way to fill the Internet with useful information about things that are important to me and I have a personal interest in.

It allows me to connect ideas and experiences in my life in ways that I might not have expected, and look back on them later as a large interconnected sum.

It's a reminder that nothing you write on the Internet is a secret, so you might as well make it public so that you consider all the implications and write guarded words or research your position carefully enough so that if I ever have to eat my words at least it'll be a balanced diet.

My perspective might shift drastically and I'd be really embarassed about the thousands of articles on my site which say a certain thing. Although the same thing happened to P.J. O'Rourke and he seems to be handling it pretty well these days.

My family could start to feel like its living with a columnist that writes about the vagaries of their personal life without hesitation or shame.

My past opinions may affect a future foray into politics. But then, when do they not?

People who have a different opinion may take out their aggressions against me violently.

It may expose me to a government that wants to round up people with certain opinions because I'm so out in the open.

I've written about some personal stuff like my tongue ring that people use as information and background because its not a big secret, but my rants about subjects like polyamory have been largely cryptic and guarded if they show up here at all.

What if I were to change my direction a little and write an article about how much a certain personal issue bugs me.

It may help someone who feels alone and finally finds someone who feels the same way they do.

I guess it would be useful to know what people think about my site, and how they use it. A survey would be useful, but dorky.

Mostly what I'm trying to figure out is whether the plus of all this writing, in the long run, is what I want to frame my life around or whether this would just be a fad. The written word never dies, especially on the Internet, so I want to make the right decision now whether to have my more personal life on display.

Currently listening to: the clanking of beer glasses and some loud girl talking to Cornflake at the Brewers Art.

Please let me know how you got here, if this page was useful to you, and your opinions.

Unless noted, all content on epistolary.org is © Copyright 1999-2008 to Rob Carlson with all rights reserved. All information is verified when possible, cited as appropriate and applied in the real world at your own risk. Send all feedback to rob@vees.net.

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