Privacy

Blogging should be a completely honest process. Should be. It should be a place where you can be entirely open and honest, be able to express your true feelings and maybe sort through some things in your head that you maybe haven’t articulated to people that know you in real life. This is fine at the start, when the blog gets absolutely no views and when you aren’t putting any posts on your social media. Then you decide to, because it’s nice for people to read your things and suddenly you have to censor yourself a little bit.

There is a situation that I would love to write about and I probably could as the likelihood is that the people concerned will never read anything about it, but what if they did. I know that feelings would be hurt and perhaps rightfully so, and the very thought of that makes me feel a little bit sick. There are more general things that I’d love to write about but again, these are real people in my life and I have to respect and understand that.

What’s the answer? Password protected posts? I see the attraction but ultimately I don’t see the point. Maybe one day. It’s a bit like private Twitter, something I respect if it’s your thing, but I can’t see myself ever doing it. I like the interaction I have there and on my very favourite Instagram, and it isn’t a medium for me that I want to have private in any way.

In a way, this blog is a bit of a love letter to my family. I was absolutely hopeless with baby books and memory boxes with the girls, I meant to do them, I have them but I couldn’t tell you which one of them cut their first tooth or the exact age they were when they first walked. It matters but doesn’t matter really. I feel awful about it sometimes but mostly it’s just something that happened that I can do nothing about. I like timehop for the little daily updates, it’s lovely to find a little reminder everyday of a particular day or a holiday that you’d forgotten the exact date of. I’d rather write about Isla talking all day long or being a bossy knickers, Grace telling me she’s missed me when she’s been away from me for about a minute, or the way that J and I met, the way that our relationship developed. I’d love them to read about themselves in years to come, see how much they were loved and will continue to be loved.

So I will continue in the vein of telling my own story, my own complicated story of juggling a lot of balls, navigating this part of my life while reminiscing about things that have happened previously. I will talk about my family, J and my girls, the new baby and how that will affect all of our lives. But not, perhaps, anyone else. I don’t want to talk about this blog with anyone I know, it can be read, of course, but I don’t need to know who is reading it and what they are thinking. I will continue to journal but in a way that means I can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

Is that fair?

(Sorry, this is another stream of consciousness post, I don’t generally read back what I’ve written before I hit publish. Sometimes it shows more than it should!)