Am I Over Writing About My Life on The Internet?

For the most part, I think writing about your life on the internet is enormously healthy. For one, the process of journaling is cathartic and an exercise in sorting out how the events of your life make you feel and where you really want them to go. Two, we’re a really social generation and it really helps to get feedback and advice. I’ve never understood people who think writing about your life is navel gazing. Haven’t they ever read a philosophy book? Poetry? Literature? The worrying and working out of the things in your life is kind of the point of being sentient.

But it’s also weird to lay all your cards on the table. The people in my everyday life know about philolzophy and if there’s an event that happens that causes me to get angsty, I’m writing about it. It doesn’t embarrass me. I’m a thoughtful, well reasoned person and my reactions to things are legitimate by virtue of the fact that I am having them alone. The problem is that because it’s online, people in my personal life might read it like I am starting a conversation with them when it’s probably not the beginning of a conversation, just the end of the day and processing what’s happened in it.

It’s also funny because the things that people seem to like to read most are all about dating which, to be honest, is the most boring activity ever that you only do because that is what a 26 year old person is supposed to be doing. Like, the concept of “boys” is really interesting in a shiny object way and having deep relationships with people is awesome but actually having to put your personality away and ask the watered down things you are supposed to ask when you are “getting to know someone” is really just a snoozefest. And, when it is actually interesting, it feels too hopeful/superstitious to talk about.

So, what I’m saying is, I only want to talk about things that are meaningful and interesting to me and for the foreseeable future that’s not things that are highly bloggable. Probably the most meaningful thing I have written in the last year is this post about how Tumblr’s new policy of deleting the blogs of people with eating disorders who are not yet in recovery is really sexist. There was really awesome feedback, but most of it was gut level reaction along the lines of “my girlfriend looked at pro-ed tumblrs when she was sick, they made her get sick” which is a positive correlation and not a cause and effect relationship. Even if it was a cause and effect relationship, why is it the onus of the people writing about their lives to change it into a happier story so that no one gets bummed out by it? Just because you haven’t reached the happy ending yet, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to write about your life. It really bothers me that people don’t understand that fundamentally.