To Tell or Not to Tell, That Is the Question
I have always toyed with the idea of making this blog known among my offline friends and acquaintances. While I’ve never kept this blog a secret from my offline counterparts, I’ve never come right out and talked about it, either. I mean, I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t have a blog and/or I am not the person behind this blog if they somehow discovered it, but blogging has never been part of any of our conversations and I’ve always just left it at that. My strategy was always unless I got outright asked about whether or not I had a blog, there was no need to discuss it.
Recently, this internal debate about whether or not to “reveal” (for lack of better term) this blog to my offline life has become a more timely issue, since I will be going abroad all of next year. Lots of kids have travel blogs they use as a way of keeping friends and family updated about their travels; I’ve been asked whether or not I’ll have a travel blog of my own. The idea of creating a travel blog as well as maintaining this one is more than I’d like to have on my plate when abroad. Since it’s never been an option for me to abandon this blog, abroad or not, I’ve been thinking whether or not I just share this blog with the offline world.
I have always written this blog with the mindset that if someone offline discovered my blog and/or I decided to open up about it by linking to it on my Facebook profile, there’d be nothing for me to hide. I don’t slag off specific people, air dirty laundry or reveal secrets that I wouldn’t reveal offline. When I talk about work, family and friends, I’ve always been guarded. (Hey, I don’t want to get dooced.) With all that in mind, what, really, is keeping me from publicly acknowledging that I have a blog that I regularly update and (I hope) is at least semi-interesting?
I guess it’s the fact that this blog, for all purposes offline, is a relatively private outlet. If I tell people about this blog and they read it when I’m abroad, chances are they aren’t going to stop reading it when I return. I guess that’s where the area of contention is for me. There’s no guarantee that anyone in my offline life will follow my blog at all but once they know about it, they aren’t going to forget my blog exists.
Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.