Thoughts on Sharing

At the end of 2014 I quietly stopped sharing most of my personal life on this blog.  It was definitely a conscious decision on my part.  Sharing my life so publicly on my blog and on other social media has become a squeamish and undesirable thing for me.  There were several reasons I felt this way. 

I am now a middle-aged woman.  I like living my life joyfully but mostly anonymously.  I started to feel like sharing on my blog and on social media actually took away from some personal experiences that I want to savor for myself.  I like enjoying the experiences with family and friends with just those people and not plaster them on the internet for strangers to look upon.  I felt like people commenting on my experiences took away from them, rather than added to them.  This is a very personal thing that has changed for me.  I did not feel this way when I first started blogging 10 years ago.  But in the last year I’ve definitely felt this way, so I wanted to test the waters of NOT sharing for myself to see how it feels.  So far I like it.

What a lot of people don’t understand about online sharing and blogging is:  You are only seeing a SNIPPET of someone’s life, not their full life at all.  People think that just because I shared a lot about eating out that I eat out all the time, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.  We cook at least five dinners every week at home.  I don’t scrapbook every dinner I make at home, because it’s just not that interesting.  It’s mundane most of the time.  But I used to blog about eating out a lot, because those were special occasions to me.  People drew the wrong conclusions.  That was just one example.

One downside of sharing so much less of my life on this blog in 2015 is I sort of miss the connection with people.  For some reason people do connect with me when I share about my personal life, even if they don’t see the rest of my life and sometimes draw the wrong conclusions.  I’ve made some good online and even real life friends through this blog.  I’m somewhat wistful that this is less likely to happen now.  But really, many of my favorite bloggers have stopped blogging.  I can see that blogging is becoming less and less of a thing now, and I am a part of it too, without planning to be. 

You are probably wondering, hmm, what about the memory-keeping aspect of your blog?  You used to say that most of your memories are kept on the blog, and only a few of them get scrapped, and that’s ok with you.  The answer is, I have been blogging my personal posts on a private blog this year, where only Todd and I can post and see the blog posts.  My life is still documented and I very much enjoy looking at my personal posts about the fun things I’ve done this year.  There’s actually been around 70 posts on my private blog that I started at the beginning of 2015.  When I scrapbook I still reference those posts and sometimes copy and paste the journaling.  I still love blogging as a form of memory-keeping.  Just not publicly.

It is the beginning of August now.  I don’t know how I’ll feel about blogging personal life blog posts here at listgirl.com going forward.  I sort of enjoy my setup for now.  However, while blogging some personal posts at my private blog this weekend, I came upon some fun experiences that I may share on this blog selectively, from time to time.  We shall see.