I feel exactly the same way about people looking over my shoulder. I simply refuse to work if anybody tries to observe me while I'm working, because nothing makes me feel more uneasy and if I'm uneasy then I'm 100x more likely to make silly mistakes, which will make me even more uneasy because my mistakes were observed! It's a vicious cycle. I prefer to write things in draft form, then revise and revise my work until I'm finally happy with it, and *then* I'll let a few people see.
You're right about writing to the audience, too. It's very easy to only portray the positive or neutral aspects of yourself. In what is essentially an arena of friends / acquaintances, you could be left very exposed by either literal or misinterpretations of what you write. The problem becomes even greater when the audience is mixed. It's strange, but most of the people I know online know me far better than the people that know me in real life because I'm much more inclined to open up to them and tell them my innermost thoughts, which I would never do to some of my oldest friends. If both groups were reading my journal, I would probably never be able to post.
Perhaps it's sneaky and exploitive to use the information they've obtained from your journal if they've got negative / selfish intentions, but if they were to use the info to buy you the perfect birthday present, for example, it doesn't seem so bad. In my opinion FO is a barrier to the public, but once someone's found your journal and especially if they've used it to "worked around" you before, it wouldn't take much to pretend to be someone new to regain access.
I could have made my old journal FO, but that doesn't quite seem like enough to me for the same reason my Facebook account was deleted because people that I didn't accept would ask again and again. Moving somewhere new *and* going FO seems like the safer option for me, but perhaps I'm just a little paranoid because I know there are one or two people that would love to find my journal.
Anyway, after all of that, I wouldn't mind getting to see some of your writing if you think you can trust me! If not, no worries. Haha :)
You're right about writing to the audience, too. It's very easy to only portray the positive or neutral aspects of yourself. In what is essentially an arena of friends / acquaintances, you could be left very exposed by either literal or misinterpretations of what you write. The problem becomes even greater when the audience is mixed. It's strange, but most of the people I know online know me far better than the people that know me in real life because I'm much more inclined to open up to them and tell them my innermost thoughts, which I would never do to some of my oldest friends. If both groups were reading my journal, I would probably never be able to post.
Perhaps it's sneaky and exploitive to use the information they've obtained from your journal if they've got negative / selfish intentions, but if they were to use the info to buy you the perfect birthday present, for example, it doesn't seem so bad. In my opinion FO is a barrier to the public, but once someone's found your journal and especially if they've used it to "worked around" you before, it wouldn't take much to pretend to be someone new to regain access.
I could have made my old journal FO, but that doesn't quite seem like enough to me for the same reason my Facebook account was deleted because people that I didn't accept would ask again and again. Moving somewhere new *and* going FO seems like the safer option for me, but perhaps I'm just a little paranoid because I know there are one or two people that would love to find my journal.
Anyway, after all of that, I wouldn't mind getting to see some of your writing if you think you can trust me! If not, no worries. Haha :)
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