Top ten reasons I rarely post to my LJ…
...for sonopan and sagamockingbird. Special thanks to witchgrrl for the formatting help.
1. I think most people would find the day-to-day workings of my life boring, or worse, ludicrous.
2. I pretty routinely do things that, while interesting, are not really for public consumption. I mean, what if I shocked you all by revealing that I’m not just a suburban housewife…? A secret identity is pretty hard to maintain when you’re spilling your guts all over the internet.
3. The ridiculous situations I find myself forced into at work, while entertaining in their stupidity, are often of such a specialized nature that it would take paragraphs of explanation before anyone would get them. You don’t want that all over your friends page, trust me.
4. I’m a priestess, and many of my communications with people are privileged. While I imagine some of you would love it if I were to divulge some of the things I’ve learned in these discussions, I can’t. It would just be wrong.
5. Growing up, I was given absolutely no privacy; anything that I actually wrote down somewhere could have been found, read, and ridiculed at any time. Or worse, I could have been punished for expressing my feelings. While I realize this was long ago, I still find myself conditioned to reluctance about committing my thoughts to paper, or pixels. Plausible deniability, you know?
6. I’m in a fair amount of pain, a fair amount of the time. Nobody wants to hear me whine. I despise the victim mentality, and refuse to write when things are bad. I’ve never wanted to be a 50 year old Goth.
7. See number 6. Between fatigue and pain meds and having to work every day, I don’t have a whole lot of productive time when my brain actually functions well enough to compose something interesting and/or entertaining. What time I do have is pretty much spent on the necessities of living.
8. As somebody told me recently, at a party I’m not gonna be the person telling stories to a large group; I’m likely to find one or two people with whom to have private conversations. I do prefer my communications with friends to be meaningful and intimate in that there is a mutual sharing. (Maybe that indicates some fear of exposure on my part, but I am who I am.) LJ feels more like broadcasting than conversation to me.
9. For the last three years or so, I seem to have developed a real reluctance about staying in touch with people. (I’m sure it’s related to a kind of depression.) I’m horrible about returning emails, or commenting on your LJ entries; phone calls are more likely to be followed up on, but not always. If I’ve done it to you, I’m sorry; please understand it’s not personal, and I’m working on it.
10. Creeping Perfectionism is NOT my friend. Everything that I write is put through numerous drafts, checking for the absolute pinnacle of exactitude of expression and readability. Slows things down considerably, as you might imagine; and sometimes, it just doesn’t seem worth it to send a one-liner about something that I’ve seen that day when it takes me three hours to write it.
Please understand that these reasons (or excuses, as I’m sure some of you would love to point out) are my own, and apply to my postings only. I thoroughly enjoy reading everything you all write, and check in several times a day for new entries. (Well, that, and to look at cute pictures of fuzzy hamsters.) I can see where this one-sidedness might feel a little creepy to some of you, so I am going to make an attempt to post a little more often.
Feel free to remind me.
1. I think most people would find the day-to-day workings of my life boring, or worse, ludicrous.
2. I pretty routinely do things that, while interesting, are not really for public consumption. I mean, what if I shocked you all by revealing that I’m not just a suburban housewife…? A secret identity is pretty hard to maintain when you’re spilling your guts all over the internet.
3. The ridiculous situations I find myself forced into at work, while entertaining in their stupidity, are often of such a specialized nature that it would take paragraphs of explanation before anyone would get them. You don’t want that all over your friends page, trust me.
4. I’m a priestess, and many of my communications with people are privileged. While I imagine some of you would love it if I were to divulge some of the things I’ve learned in these discussions, I can’t. It would just be wrong.
5. Growing up, I was given absolutely no privacy; anything that I actually wrote down somewhere could have been found, read, and ridiculed at any time. Or worse, I could have been punished for expressing my feelings. While I realize this was long ago, I still find myself conditioned to reluctance about committing my thoughts to paper, or pixels. Plausible deniability, you know?
6. I’m in a fair amount of pain, a fair amount of the time. Nobody wants to hear me whine. I despise the victim mentality, and refuse to write when things are bad. I’ve never wanted to be a 50 year old Goth.
7. See number 6. Between fatigue and pain meds and having to work every day, I don’t have a whole lot of productive time when my brain actually functions well enough to compose something interesting and/or entertaining. What time I do have is pretty much spent on the necessities of living.
8. As somebody told me recently, at a party I’m not gonna be the person telling stories to a large group; I’m likely to find one or two people with whom to have private conversations. I do prefer my communications with friends to be meaningful and intimate in that there is a mutual sharing. (Maybe that indicates some fear of exposure on my part, but I am who I am.) LJ feels more like broadcasting than conversation to me.
9. For the last three years or so, I seem to have developed a real reluctance about staying in touch with people. (I’m sure it’s related to a kind of depression.) I’m horrible about returning emails, or commenting on your LJ entries; phone calls are more likely to be followed up on, but not always. If I’ve done it to you, I’m sorry; please understand it’s not personal, and I’m working on it.
10. Creeping Perfectionism is NOT my friend. Everything that I write is put through numerous drafts, checking for the absolute pinnacle of exactitude of expression and readability. Slows things down considerably, as you might imagine; and sometimes, it just doesn’t seem worth it to send a one-liner about something that I’ve seen that day when it takes me three hours to write it.
Please understand that these reasons (or excuses, as I’m sure some of you would love to point out) are my own, and apply to my postings only. I thoroughly enjoy reading everything you all write, and check in several times a day for new entries. (Well, that, and to look at cute pictures of fuzzy hamsters.) I can see where this one-sidedness might feel a little creepy to some of you, so I am going to make an attempt to post a little more often.
Feel free to remind me.