Censorship

My life is so public these days. I have accounts with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter as well as other more interest-specific groups like Craftster, Dogster, and Ravelry. And in these accounts, I have "friends"--people that I would recognize in person, people whose faces I've never seen, and people who know me so well that, frankly, it's embarrassing to think about sometimes.

And then there's this blog.

I love community of all sorts, and I like these social movements. I think of it as a way of being together, worldwide, and it's wonderful to share ideas and experiences in a boundary-free way.

But I've come into a conundrum. I'm not crafting so much because I'm doing other, good for me things and I'm not alone as much. This is good, but it leaves a little hole in my social networking. A hole that I'm hesitant to fill with real, personal details.

Why? Because, for the first time ever, there are "friends" that I sort-of know that I don't really want to share every detail of my life with. "Friends" who comment on odd things when I run into them in person, who say "I saw on Facebook that you went to Austin last weekend" in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. There are people integrating my personal life with my screened-for-them life.

I've always been an open, honest person, and I find it difficult to think about censoring myself, but I am also beginning to appreciate privacy to a certain extent.

So I'm considering what to share here when I don't have wonderful pictures of knitting to share. What to talk about while I'm thinking about where I'm headed next. What to mention when I want to share something more important than the weather, but less important than how I feel about something going on with people who might read this.

Difficult, this public/private life. Interesting that we choose to share it, and the way we screen ourselves. Also interesting when we don't censor ourselves and end up embarrassed, or worse, fired.