the intersection of openness, intimacy, and privacy as it relates to me

[belenen]

icon: "distance (two hands (from two people) just barely apart, facing each other palm to palm)"So a friend of mine told me something that had an intense emotional impact on me (and was then unavailable for conversation), and I talked with another friend about it to try to process it. Several days later, the first friend told me that they wanted it

Comments

[slinkslowdown]

anything is fine to share unless otherwise specified

Works for me. It's how I operate with all of my friends; everyone's free to share anything unless I specifically say not to [which is rarely].

[belenen]

soooo happy about this :D it makes me that happy too!

[kmiotutsie]

I love the clarity of this SO MUCH. Idk what else to say about it! You're so GOOD!

[rubyelf]

I'm funny that way... my journal is intensely personal. It is also almost completely public. The only entries that are not are those where I talk about specific people in my real life... because I do not want my journal to have any connection to my real life. I do not want my family or associates to know that this is me. They don't need to know me this well... yet I am willing to let total strangers know me this well. Perhaps because the strangers can't hurt me with it. In my time here there have been maybe two people I was willing to share my real name and other personal information with... but I post pictures of myself regularly. At some point, I suppose, someone may stumble upon them and recognize me. And if they read a few entries, they'll know it's definitely me. But that hasn't happened yet, and so I keep my journal public. I don't know exactly why. I guess it's that foolish hope I have that someone will read something there that will matter to them.

[queerbychoice]

You're living dangerously, in an age of facial recognition algorithms and Google image search allowing people to select a picture and find where else that picture is posted on the Internet. Be careful.

[rubyelf]

I'm fully aware of this, except that it's not really dangerous, because there really isn't anything in my journal that would do much other than piss off my mother and offend my sisters. My husband and my daughter know about it and I don't have any friends. So if my family and the few other people I know discover me here, it's not exactly going to wreck my life, because I don't have one. No scandals. Married, not cheating, no drugs, nothing to hide, really. If I really thought I needed to worry I'd make my journal friends-only. If someone actually takes the time to bother to track me down here, they're welcome to go ahead and read whatever they find. And if some employer doesn't want to hire me because they somehow find out I write smutty fanfic under a nickname, I probably don't want to be working for them anyway because I don't want to work for any place that needs to Google Search their employees' Facebook pictures of their cats.

[ravensong]

I don't usually understand social assumptions re: privacy either. I, too, need the person to be blunt and straight forward and say "hey, don't share this" or something to that effect.