Blogs the internet and self-censorship.

Posted on April 16, 2012

10



 I write a lot.
I would NEVER be able to write like this. Ever.
I have this box in my closet full of journals from my youth. I have horrible handwriting, seriously horrible, like one of my mother’s friends asked if I was mentally retarded when she got my hand written high school graduation notice many moons ago. Any whoo –I can’t read 1/2 of them but it’s cool to  thumb through the scribbles when I’m in writing rut and remember who I was and from whence I came.  I also have this dream that if I keep them around long enough I might have kids who will stumble upon these journals and realize that good ol’ mom wasn’t so much different they are now back in her golden years. Never mind that I have no children and the world is changing so quickly that every other day I wonder about the validity of this idea…le sigh.
Electro dreams.
 It’s kind of cool to trace my switch from a paper journal to online journaling. Somewhere around 1999 (oh lord I am getting old) I started hosting my journals across the net, Live journal and then MySpace (ah gloriously defunct MySpace) Facebook in snippets of daily emotion and then Scribd for my academic writing and now here – because I can’t really say that these musings are any different than my 16 year old scribbles…just more philosophically minded.  It is the musing philosophical part of me that notices how over time, I’ve left these little electronic foot prints across the desert of the unreal/ real of cyberspace.
Real Life static.
The thing about the interwebz is that it likes to capture and project. It is a living, multiplying being that takes what I write and makes it accessible to anyone who wants to read it. ..Future bosses, future students, past lovers, future lovers…my mom and now even my grandma ( HI GRANDMA!). There are times where I look back on what I’ve written and I blush, at my lack of sense at my lack of grammar at my need to use words like Phantasmagorical … what – it’s a real word. look it up! Thankfully I journaled under a moniker from 18- 29 and really only started to come out of the closet as a blogger recently. . .so I really don’t have a ton of dirt out there for people to find.. . Or do I?
I sometimes wonder if this blog is the “dirt” for others to find. I rarely censor my posts and when I do it’s because I took the time to run through the following questions to the self:

What will my super conservative mother think of this?
Will my livelihood suffer?
Am I adding value to my blog and/or to the lives of others?
If I can answer these questions correctly I continue. If I can’t I hit the delete button – go and practice asana take a walk and calm down.
I share the things I do for a number of reasons. Some of them selfish, many of them selfless and a few lie in between. In this litigious society I wonder not if, but when will my words or the life I’ve chosen to lead come back and bite me in the ass. Is it when a future boss Google’s me ?Is it when I do have a kid and they wander in and ask me about a photo they’ve found of me acting foolish or an especially vitriolic post? When do my words become too much and cross over some kind of blurry invisible barrier into the realm of “not ok to blog about”?
I think this is perhaps a 2 part post – what makes a post or really anything in life work the risk… I’ll leave it for now with this question:
Besides the obvious things that are deemed illegal by your government to write about or act on – are there specific things that you refuse to blog about and for what reason?
Namaste,
Ahimsamaven
Related articles
Tagged: , , , , , ,
Posted in: Life, news, Yoga