This morning’s Sunday edition of The New York Times’ New York Times Magazine features a cover story by writer, blogger, and former co-editor of Gawker.com, Emily Gould, entitled, “Blog-Post Confidential: Exposed: What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online.” In the article, Ms. Gould weaves a cautionary tale of the risks one takes when one shares too many intimate details of their lives and relationships in the very public forum that is the blogosphere. It is a poignant piece of losing two different men to two different blogs, and poses some provocative questions concerning why some of us who blog feel the need to share the more intimate details of our lives on the Internet, the price we sometimes pay for doing so, and, perhaps most importantly, at what point does “sharing” on the Internet become, as Ms. Gould puts it, “oversharing?” It is a very well-articulated piece, and I highly recommend that everyone read it (particularly those bloggers who, like Ms. Gould — and myself — may perhaps be prone to “oversharing”).
My own lessons learned due to oversharing begin here.
In March of 2003, I started a blog.
My mother had died several weeks earlier, my relationship of nearly ten years was in turmoil and nearing dissolution, and I did not want to further inconvenience my close friends who were already overburdened with my emotions by continuing to cry effusively to them on a daily basis. I knew that several of my graphic and web designer friends from the online design forums I frequented maintained blogs, and I remembered how I had, until several years earlier, always made it a practice to keep a daily, written account of my thoughts and experiences, and how cathartic that sometimes had been for me. So I did some research on the various options that were available to me and eventually set up a rather modest LiveJournal blog. It was not much to begin with, to be sure: it “boasted” a plain, standard template, those few designer acquaintances were the only people listed on my “Friends List,” and the blog’s title was likely no more imaginative than, “The Bartelby Journal,” or something equally as juvenile. But it was mine: my space, all alone out there in the great white Internet, removed from the man I no longer felt loved me enough; closer, somehow, to the mother I had recently lost; and always willing to receive, with no expectations nor judgment, the words, thoughts, experiences, and hopes with which I decided to fill its blank, pixelated “pages.”
The first few entries seemed magical to me: I was writing again! And not “writing” as in annual employee assessments or design and production budgets or agendas for spec or pitch meetings, but actual writing! I wrote short, depressing pieces regarding my mother’s death and subsequent journey back to Chicago to attend her memorial service with my brother and his family, a more esoteric piece about Pele following a long weekend on the Big Island with my boyfriend, and an article eulogizing both the loss of Funny Cide at the Belmont Stakes that year and the death of my relationship. All carefully crafted in language, and published online, like my own little book with its own (albeit small) readership. But more important, to me, was that not only were the pieces “out there” for others, they were “there” for me: the products of my experiences and my own particular take on the events of my life.
Not long after my break-up, the tenor of my blog posts changed dramatically. They were no longer individual pieces crafted by me, for me, and for the few readers who cared about my life and what was occurring in it. They became love letters, to a man with whom I eventually rebounded entirely too soon following the end of a nearly ten-year-long relationship. The entries continued to be written for him, and to him, even after we moved in together, humorous ways for me to check in with him throughout the day while I was in my office and he was in class or at home in our condo. I would come across something funny online, or have a sudden thought, post it, and within minutes my telephone would ring and it would be him, having just checked in with me via my blog, chuckling at what he had read. Soon after the proverbial honeymoon period had ended, the posts, although still written to him, changed from happy and humorous, to sad, and eventually to desperate, as my relationship with him, too, began to crumble, and by nine months into that relationship, not even a full year into the life of my blog, I was single, for the first time in my life.
Following the initial period of post-break-up weepy entries, my blog became infused with my own unique brand of vitriol, marking the first of many moments of oversharing to come, and one of the few I truly regret, in hindsight, because the linguistic arrows I hurled in my most recent ex-boyfriend’s direction did not fall on blind eyes. He was still reading me, reading me reveal too much, reading my pain, and reading his own pain caused by my words. But he was not the only one reading. Anger, rage, and vengeance are perfect foundations for excellent blog entries, and these kinds of entries attract all manner of readers. My readership began to grow. I was becoming, I felt, a “real” blogger.
My blog began to metamorphose, much like its audience base. I changed my user name, upgraded the blog’s title (”The Martini Diaries”), and made the design sexier. I drank a lot. I slept around a lot. I had no problem with returning to my condo at four in the morning and composing an inebriated, barely coherent piece regarding what (and who) I had done throughout the evening, all to the delight of my (mostly female) readership, most of whom were beginning to feel like my best friends forever. Thanks to my most recent break-up, two fifths of Stolichnaya every evening, and a nearly perpetual loop of “Sex and the City” episodes playing on my television in the background, I composed what I still think to this day are some of my best pieces concerning relationships, and also erotica. I was loving it, this being in charge of making people laugh, cry, or rage, with only my experiences and my words. A year and another highly publicized relationship and break-up later, my blog’s design and title changed yet again (”Notes From A Phoenix”). I was in the proverbial seventh heaven of blogging.
Fortunately for me, I was never forced to worry about what my romantic partners thought of me blogging about them. Aside from the poisonous entries that I wrote about my rebound man, I was able to keep what I wrote about each largely positive, and none of them really seemed to care one way or another that their private lives and personalities were being splayed across my blog for everyone to read as much as my own were. My problem, instead, became those readers who had become my friends.
As sometimes happens amongst friends, in real life or online, people make decisions for themselves and take different paths. Sometimes, those friendships that are healthy to begin with are malleable enough to change with the people who play in them. Others, depending on the rigidity of the personalities of those involved, are not. I suddenly found myself in the middle of a circle of very strong-willed, stubborn, and unbending individuals I once termed my best friends forever, who suddenly, after over two years of knowing me, disagreed with the way in which I was living my life and representing it in my online writing, and who wanted me to change. And when I refused to do so, I suddenly realized that these people had a wealth of years’ worth of personal information about me, not only what I had shared with them in the time I had known them, but also about my past, about my childhood, about…well, about everything about me. And they were not afraid to use it against me, to talk amongst themselves about what a mess they thought I was making of my life and what a horrible person I was, to color what mutual friends of ours thought of me, and to generally make my online world, this world to which I could escape, as miserable as my offline world sometimes was.
In so many words, they stole from me that safe space that I had so lovingly carved out of the great white Internet, for myself, way back in March of 2003.
In an act of defiance, I stripped my blog of all design elements and chose a stark, minimalist layout. I changed the title in one final effort to keep the passion of that space, of my words, of my life, alive: “ctrl+Z: & The Life without Undo.” And then, after only a few months, and for a long while after that, I lost the will to blog. I locked all of the entries in my blog that were public. I attempted to continue relationships with those online friends I had cultivated, but everything in that space seemed somehow tainted by the experiences I had encountered there, and by the anger and resentment with which these former “friends” had ended their associations with me. For awhile, I stopped writing at all, save for a “Friends Filter” I used specifically for my surrogate little sister to read of my daily stories involving work, potential romantic interests, and exploits with the few remaining “real life” friends I still boasted in the islands.
The blog I had loved for so long now felt dead.
By January of 2007, when the last of my remaining “real life” friends had left the islands to return to the Mainland, when my best friend had suddenly stopped speaking to me, and when I was left feeling entirely abandoned during the lonely holiday season, I nearly slit my wrists open in a hotel bathtub, somehow decided not to (Blessed Be, Shannen Doherty), and also decided that I had had enough. Because I needed a space for myself again. I needed a space in which to write again. And no one, I vowed, was going to prevent me from having it. I once again did some research, this time chose a pseudonym, and established a new blog.
This time around, I made it a point to be more mindful of what I was writing about, of how I was presenting myself, of what I was presenting about myself. I decided that the blog would always be entirely open to the public, which I thought, rightfully so, would force me to put more thought, and more caution, into what I was writing and divulging online. And I made a pact with myself to be more mindful of scrutinizing those readers who approached me far more carefully than I had previously before allowing them into my inner circle. Before, for me, “Without Undo” meant that I could do what I wanted and write what I wanted without a care for anything or anyone, that I could blindly tap out, “Holy shit! I am so fucking in ebriated and what am I doing?!1 Dahsing up to The Green Room for several TOp shelf Cosmopolitans before strutting into ThE Lion’s Den. Here’s hoping I meet up with some fucking interestinfg people who won’t give me STDsa and know how to fucking discusss KANTinental philosophyu and surrealist apainters because that’s what I W fucking feel like talking about tonightr. Ha ha hA!!12″ as a drunk entry and not care anything about it. And although archived entries such as that one still make me laugh like hell when I come across them, this blog now is more of a “Blog Without Undo” than any version of it that I have maintained before. Because now, before I click “Publish,” I am confident that I have written precisely what I intended, and have nothing to be ashamed of nor to apologize for, and that I have not “overshared.”
I suppose a casual reader might point to entries such as my near-suicide, or my recent addiction entries, and suggest that those are examples of oversharing. Except they’re not, really. They may be unconventional in terms of what they share, and they may certainly make my headhunters pray that potential employers never find this little corner of the Internet, but not only are they examples of me putting myself and my words out there for me, they are also examples of me putting myself and my words out there for others, others who may be experiencing the same things, and need to know that they are not alone. They are also entries that represent individual chapters of the larger book that is, well, me.
In the final post in her blog “Heartbreak Soup,” Ms. Gould concluded, “I made some mistakes, it’s true. Writing this may well be another! But I am not going to shut up just because I might regret what I’ve said later. That might be the smart thing to do, and I’ve tried to, but I can’t. It must be because I’m a blogger.” As much as I have overshared online in my time as a serious blogger, and as much as I have sometimes “overtrusted” others with intimate details about myself, like Ms. Gould, I cannot worry about regret. Because what is far more important to me than regretting something I have written is being able to return to it, weeks, months, or even years later, and be able to see the education of myself as a blogger, as a writer, and as a person, to see the arc between what and who I once was, and what and who I have become.
But I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004 — there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.
When I look back on my own history of oversharing online, it is Ms. Gould’s final thought in her article with which I agree the most. As much of a game of chance, of calculated risks, as blogging sometimes is, there are some of us who simply seem to need it: that rush of writing, of creation, that sense of space for ourselves, and for however many others enjoy reading us, out there in the great white Internet. I will never again have my humble, safe little “Bartelby Journal,” either. But I do have “Curious Affairs,” which, to me, is a body of work that shows me just how far that little Törleß boy has come, and just how much he has grown into the Bartelby man he is now.
I’d also amend Gould’s final line just one bit, for myself.
We should not only leave the door open because of everything we’d be locking out, but also because of everything we’d be locking in.
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Author’s Note: As a daily (i.e., casual) visitor of Gawker.com for the past two years, I had become a fan of Ms. Gould’s excellent writing, caustic wit, and personal anecdotes during her tenure with the blog, but I was vastly ill-prepared for all that I discovered during my research for this piece. A lot (actually, most) of what I discovered angered me on Ms. Gould’s behalf, and I strongly feel that there is much more to be written regarding the seemingly industry-wide vitriolic reaction to her New York Times Magazine article. Out of respect for her and for her piece, however, I have chosen to remain on-topic in my response to it. But I have linked below several important items that will, perhaps, allow anyone who wishes to do so to draw their own conclusions regarding the, as Gawker’s own Ian Spiegelman termed it, “ensuing media cluster-fuck,” surrounding Ms. Gould’s article. Indeed.
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