Feministe Feedback: Blogging About Your Personal Life

I write about personal stuff often. The personal is the best way to illustrate the daily misogyny and hypocrisy we all live with. I generally keep boyfriend talk to exes (if it’s negative) to save headaches. I am also fortunate that even though all my friends and family know about my blogs, they only read them rarely. I do occasionally get into with my cousin over religion, but I think we both enjoy those debates.

Probably the toughest thing for me to write was this about abortion because I was afraid it would open me up to all sorts of forced pregnancy crazies. But all I got was support

In my short blogging life (four months and going strong!), I haven’t encountered this too much. Part of it is, of course, because my blog is about works of fiction and my analysis of them. However, I have had articles that talk about issues in a more personal way.

Honestly, I never had the problem of telling a loved one’s personal story. I did, however, post a slightly scathing article which complained about Irish comic book stores. In the comments, I had a protracted argument with one of the founders of the entire Irish comics scene, which was quite educational. It did teach me, however, that I was not blogging in a vacuum.

I came across this problem more blatantly when I tried (and failed) to do a webcomic about my life. Because you can’t be an aspiring artist in your 20s if you don’t do something autobiographical, of course. Anyhow, I started changing details to avoid offence and to streamline the story, but what stared back at me wasn’t my story anymore, or anyone else’s. I abandoned the project twice now, because I didn’t see the point.

Once more, it’s different when you have a blog. My policy is to ask the person in question, or talk about people with whom I have no contact anymore (of course, never naming anyone).

My blog is relatively young and anytime I blog about something personal it’s fairly uninteresting. Although in the beginning I posted about an Irish model who died from a cocaine overdose and I basically posted my views on drugs (which was basically I don’t like them (but I do agree with cannabis legalisation) and I think coke turns people into loud walking-egos but if you’re a grown-up I’m not gonna say hey you don’t do that- whatever its a choice thing)…Anyway in my blog I said I don’t like this stuff and despite my views sometimes I worry about people I know who are fond of illegal substances….all of a sudden someone I knew gave me an unmerciful amount of bullshit over it and said I was trying to ‘out’ them on the net as a drug-user. Keep in mind now, I never mentioned a name or gave any indication of gender or geographic location etc. It was worded *really* vaguely and anyway, eventually I just said fuck this i’ll take it down. Post deleted. I can’t be bothered with the hassle over it. I think it was just an indication of drug-induced paranoia (!) but it seriously caused me alot of shit. Since then I’ve tried to keep mentioning stuff like that to a minimum.

I guess I just like a quiet life too much :)

In some ways I think I am my best self when I’m online. I can erase vicious Emails before I send them and I can speak calmly much more easily. In person I tend to blurt things out.

As I think about this question I realize that on my blog I am much less likely to express personal resentment or irritation – my husband and other people I know read my posts. I won’t post something on the blog that I wouldn’t say to him, and I don’t want to violate his privacy by posting about our sex life or our intimate relationship. But I’m much more likely to express my fury at the system – the medical system, the political system, the patriarchal system.

Most of the time that’s where my anger belongs, anyway, so I’m satisfied. Thanks for the question – I learned something about myself and my blog!

In the past, I wrote a lot really personal things and over time realized that it didn’t make me feel comfortable, so I stopped. Now I blog anonymously (as possible) and never, ever mention people (I know) by name. Sometimes I blog about real things and I know that there are a few people who will read them and disagree — two of my closest friends are conservatives — but it’s my blog and his is how I feel about particular issues, so whatever. Disagreement can lead to good discourse.

Well, it may just be that I have a tiny blog, but I find that since I’m semi-anonomous, and I always refer to friends and family by letters, instead of their names, it works out okay. None of my friends read anyway, and always vet my husbands stuff.

The honest way to go about personal blogging is to blog about yourself in a personal manner, but don’t succumb to the temptation to write posts about how awesome you are and everyone around you is a pain in the ass. Extend to people the same forgiveness you give yourself.

I blog quite a bit about my life, though I often change key identifying details of others. I blog too from a position of tenure, following the rule that even if you think your blog is anonymous, it probably isn’t — and everyone you know may end up reading what you’ve written.

I blog a great deal about my students, though I always preserve anonymity. If it’s really dicey, I ask for permission and give them a chance to read the post before it goes up.

I rarely blog about my wife — commenters are indeed a cruel lot sometimes, and any hostility I arouse in others cannot impact my spouse. I’m committed to that.

When I blogged about getting circumcised at 37… that got me a lot of family phone calls.

I am teaching an upper-level lit course on memoirs and we have been talking about this issue all semester. The students are all writing mini-memoirs and I ask them regularly how they feel writing about other people. They say, “It’s my story and I write what I want and I am not really concerned about anyone else,” and they also say, “I am writing about other people but not terribly worried about it since this is only for class and only two or three people will be reading it.”

So far no one is bothering to change names or identifying details or any of the other strategies memoirists often use.

My students are very young adults–19? 20? I think their attitude is terribly naive. The bottom line is that when you write about someone else in a public forum and share perhaps unflattering details about that person, you are opening yourself up for attack, and it has nothing to do with “patriarchy.” It has to do with the nature of relationships. You have to make the choice about what matters more–respecting the other person’s right to privacy [no matter how big of an asshole he is] OR being scrupuloulsy honest about every detail in service to…what? Art? Social justice? Vengeance? Schadenfreude? Think about our cultural values–we value our right to privacy AND our right to free expression; we value human dignity AND our right to free expression. We value our right to free expression AND our right NOT to express ourselves.

Those are tough, tough choices. All I’m sayin’: it’s always a risk, and you have to know that. I don’t think it’s “wrong” to write about others, but it’s wrong to think that there shouldn’t be consequences to doing so. There ARE consequences. Published memoirists know it–many of them say right off the bat that they have no relationship with the people they have exposed. That’s the price they paid to tell their stories. In many cases it was worth it. In some…maybe not.

Why should it be any different for bloggers? It’s a public forum.

I ran into this issue recently, as my blog is entirely personal anecdotes. I wrote about a fight I had had with a friend, without mentioning any names at all, and not linking to anywhere he writes. He didn’t extend me the same courtesy, though, when he decided to blog and link my posts on the matter. I thought it was all good as long as I kept the writing about the argument abstract and within the confines of a broader discussion, but despite the fact that his identity wasn’t revealed and only 4 other people were privvy to the argument, that somehow everyone in the world would get the wrong idea about him. So then he gave my blog tons of hits from people obviously coming from a place of thinking of me as the wrong one.

Thus… don’t use other people you know for blog fodder, even namelessly, unless you’re up for the potential consquences. I realize this now.

I have a locked journal and I don’t add people if I think that they might be shit-stirrers. I know that sounds vague, but I look to see who is on their friends list because you never know. That being said, I also don’t use names and I never bitch about people who read my journal because that is just passive-aggressive and shitty (and I’ve defriended people who do that, because I can’t stomach reading stuff like that).

If I had a friend who did something horribly offensive, I would confront that person before blogging about it for sure. However, if someone did something horribly offensive that would make me end the friendship, then I might post about it after the fact but of course change the names or leave them out.

I am extremely opinionated about feminist and anti-racist issues on my public blog and if anyone doesn’t like what I have to say, they are free to comment, but not to attack me and be assholes about it. Not cool.

one time i blogged a bunch of reminiscences from my adolescence, including those of a girl on whom i had a terrible, hopeless crush. i even wrote something about her partying habits at the time. and even though i should have known better, perhaps because nearly a quarter of a century had gone by, i blogged her name.

of course, the students of her middle school class found it like lightning.

thank god she has a great sense of humor. we share friendly e-correspondence now, but i still turn brick red thinking about the silliness of my actions.

the internet is like office scuttlebutt times a brazillion. it’s better not to say anything about anyone if you don’t want it coming back on you ten thousandfold. of course, if the ten thousandfold return is your aim and of higher value than meatspace friendships, then by all means damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

Let me say (without id-ing anyone) that someone I know insisted on writing something that was real but fictionalized–that is, real in some particulars like names and completely “made-up” in other ways that he thought were more artistic…so that anyone reading that material would believe that those real people were a certain way or had done made-up stuff–including stuff that was the exact opposite of what those people were like. I told him that a number of people would be hurt, personally and also professionally as far as endangering their jobs (because he had made up stuff about their real jobs too.) He didn’t care and only outside forces prevented him from publishing because of liability concerns.
This experience made me realize that even though we have our own truths and want to shout out about them–that privacy is important and should be respected. If the person we are talking about is a public figure, the rules are somewhat different. That doesn’t mean that we can’t write about real life situations without concealing some things…and truth is always a defense when you are doing a memoir, as long as you understand what hurting someone in public is legally.
For me, I sometimes want to talk about certain people hurting me or their relationship to me when they are acting a certain way, but I just conceal who they are. There are many easy ways to do this, even “I once went out with” someone, even if they are a current person, etc., not that you would be able to tell if I’ve ever done that! ;-) and I’m not telling!!! Y’all here are fabulous.

I tend to regard blogging about family, friends and lovers in the same light as blogging about work. The InterWebz is a big place, but unless you use privacy settings for your posts, everything is public (and even those privacy settings are hackable, although the fault is then on the hacker.) I would assume that whatever you say on your blog – no matter how much you may regard it as your own personal space – is in the public forum. A friend of mine avoids a lot of problems in blogging about his workplace by creating somewhat humorous descriptors: “Officeland,” “Passive-Aggressive Boss,” etc. I think something similar could be done with personal relations, e.g.: “Redneck Uncle was cracking more offensive jokes the other day.” (I chose “Redneck Uncle” because I have one who does indeed crack really offensive jokes.)

Obviously there are shortcomings here. You compromise some specificity to your life, it somewhat depersonalizes the anecdote, and your subjects may recognize themselves, anyway (“Redneck Uncle? Hey, that sounds like me!”) But I think there are benefits: creativity in coming up with appellations, a certain satirical edge, and the less likely chance of creating more personal problems than one wants to deal with after a long day’s struggle.

But I put all that as a recommendation, not as a Thou Shalt. In the end, these are very personal decisions one has to make.

I use two blogs; one mostly personal, the other mostly not. It more or less works; someone I hoped wouldn’t wind up reading the non-personal one now does, but I’ve dealt with that and ploughed on. I think that always having an alternative helps; rather than asking ‘Should I blog this?’ I can ask ‘Where does this fit?’, as not writing it down is recognised by those who know me as not really being an option.

It took me awhile to decide whether to blog anonymously or whether to blog as myself and I opted for blogging as myself. I blog about issues pertaining to girls, girls programming, and non profits, and I walk a line between my personal anecdotes and opinions about what is happening in the field. I never talk about things currently going on at work unless its info for public consumption. But I do try to throw in some anecdotes when I can because I think people can relate to it and I know I like reading the more personal info in other people’s blogs. It helps build the connections. If readers know what I am struggling with, I think it helps.

For me its been best to be more conservative about what to share, then to be more open. As a result comments on my blog tend to be positive.

I don’t blog about my personal life or the people in my life. Especially given the stalker factor, I’d prefer to err on the side of caution and privacy on behalf of my friends and family.

My personal opinion is that if you have any interest in being a writer, the first person you will expose intentional or otherwise is yourself. The more you write, the more who you are comes out. The lines you draw about how you include interactions are part of that.

On the one hand, this isn’t “published” work in the terms Pepy’s diaries, and will be seen by, if you are fortunate a few hundred readers. So it isn’t exactly putting it out in the New Yorker. But it isn’t exactly private either and it is a form of expression, entertainment, etc.

For me, any representative of an industry is fair game, particularly when they represent that industry, and even then I tend not to use the name. Just, ‘That’s when M. whispered to me that ‘Blacks don’t really have the capacity for management.” – that sort of material because the greatest problems which exist are usually due to individuals whose actions and attitudes are not reflective of the corporate “vision” – has this backfired? Well, I wrote a rather scathing piece about the lack of privacy for medical information when a particular manager of a respite tacked my entire medical history to the board in the dining room. That manager due to a shuffle is now my assigned home care manager. Not comfortable BUT the problem of sharing confidential medical information within the carers of people with disabilities remains a problem. I tend not to write abstract articles because when people do or say inane things, they make a better literal point than an abstract one. I also carry a tape recorder. I also usually tell people (as I did her) that I write about disability issues. I also realize that it is entirely my point of view and they may come out with a blog showing thier viewpoint and we can discuss it (which honestly would be good, since this is less a debate than a penal system).

I guess the question is whether your topic or life is centered in such a way that you want to write so personally and be honest about that. Or instead, like most memoir writers, TRY and obscure who you are talking about and then have everyone find out anyway (Cassanova is a prime example).

Not very much about my personal life or people in it. I write about local politics and police issues. If I name individuals, they are usually one or the other. I’ve had a couple interesting situations like sitting next to an officer whose shooting I blogged extensively about at an event and an elected official ranting about my blog and me during a public meeting of the elected body. The police chief blamed it on his inability to promote one officer whose shooting I’d blogged about.

Things like that and a lot of truly bad comments to the point where I had to shut comments down in 2007. I still get nasty emails and posting on other local internet sites from anonymous individuals and some interesting ones.

My family didn’t even know I had a blog nor did most of my friends until I went to see some relatives for a holiday and they’d all read stories about it that went out on the wire because it was part of an investigation into possible police officer misconduct. That’s another reason not to write about myself given how many visits from the city’s computer (which apparently includes the police department) my site receives daily including I’m fairly certain ones who really dislike me anyway.