bombs in bottles
After reading two posts on what we do/don't share on "personal" sites, I'm now thinking about this too.
https://manuelmoreale.com/how-personal-should-a-personal-site-be
https://starbreaker.org/grimoire/entries/all-that-i-leave-unwritten/index.html
Like the authors of those two posts, there's a lot I don't write about here. For me, that usually stems from 1-3 of three reasons:
...You didn't think my parents actually named me "Molly Tov," did you?
After decades of trying to have a Public Unitary Identity across social media and my professional blog, I've nuked nearly all of it from orbit and now do all my online socializing on the small web, behind a pseudonym. Nobody who knew the online professional/personal me from my legal name or any of its variants can now find me, apart from the three-page Neocities site I use to maintain my resume and portfolio for business purposes.
The trick to keeping it that way, of course, is to avoid sharing too many intimate personal details. Eventually those add up. I might not be the only person who grew up in X location or played Y varsity sport for Z college or wrote for Q publication or who was in a major motorcycle accident that widowed me before I turned 40, but add up enough of those details and there's only one person who emerges, eventually.
I think of my life stories as my personal user agent string, and I do my best to mask that thing online.
Full disclosure: I'm actually named after this sweetheart:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1887384895/little-miss-molly-cute-molotov-vinyl
I'd rather not talk about some parts of my past, or present. So I don't.
There's actually no worse moment in my past than that motorcycle accident, but I let that be the exception because it changed me, permanently, in ways I'm still coming to terms with and will be for the rest of my life probably.
There's also a bunch of other stuff I don't really want to revisit, though, and so I won't. Again, it's partly about masking my personal user agent string online. It's also about not really wanting to rip open old wounds in front of a mass audience. I pay a therapist for that.
Of the many impossible parts of losing my spouse, one of the hardest has been that I also lost my best friend, my colleague, my mentor, and the person I used to bounce things off when the bag of cats that is my brain got out of control.
I might have gone to blogging for that, except I figured out pretty quickly that was a bad idea. The Series of Tubes is FULL of ferrets who think they know exactly which Hallmark card to recite to make themselves feel better about all your problems. When it doesn't work, they get bitey.
A few days after I got home from the hospital, still in a wheelchair and non-weight-bearing in three of my four limbs, I started journaling. I'd kept a journal intermittently for years, but since my return, I've kept it daily. It's where I write down what I did each day, who I talked to, what I'm thinking about. It's how I bounce stuff of my husband even if he's no longer here to respond to it.
Those conversations are between what I have left of him and me. They're nobody else's business.
Also, most of them are pretty boring. If you really want to know whether I bought carrots this week, send me an email, I guess.
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