A lot of my friends write long, thoughtful “year-in-review” letters to send to all their friends and family around Christmas or New Year’s. I’ve never entirely understood this, and I’ve often wondered if it’s a midwest thing (having gone to high school and undergrad in Kansas City, most of my friends are from the midwest). No one in my immediate or extended family has ever done this in my entire life, and it is something I had never been exposed to until my high school friends started doing it.
I don’t write these sorts of letters myself. Frankly, my life is not interesting enough to write about, and a lot of things that I would include in such a letter are not necessarily things I need/want everyone to know about. The friends/family that I feel comfortable sharing such information with already know.
But I sometimes wonder why I don’t share the bad things, the problems, the embarrassing bits more freely, like I see so many of my friends do online – whether it be twitter or facebook or a blog or whatever. There are a few reasons, of course. First, I have an extremely high capacity for embarrassment. The smallest things mortify me. Seeing other people do or say something embarrassing mortifies me. There are entire movies and tv shows I am physically incapable of watching because the second embarrassment is genuinely painful to me. So there’s that. There is also the problem, as always, of not wanting to share my problems for fear of being accused of whining, or of trying to garner pity, or some such thing. And on top of all that, I am constantly fighting the conflicting desires of wanting people to care while also not wanting them to worry.
For the most part, I don’t much care what strangers think of me. I can share thoughts and feelings anonymously on twitter or tumblr or where-ever without much concern. I can give talks at conferences without undue levels of terror (I mean, there’s always SOME terror, this is me after all), because I know I will never see most of these people again. But I balk at the idea of telling some of these things to people I really know, people I will have to face. Hell, half the time I cannot even stand the idea of letting a friend or colleague read something I wrote – no matter how much I trust that friend or colleague. The room full of conference attendees doesn’t matter. YOU all do. And so I cannot stand to face judgment, even the gentlest and kindest of judgments. Mine is a very fragile ego, all told. I have low self-esteem even on my best days. And let’s be honest, the last few years have not been my best days.
A few years ago, I started an anonymous blog for the expressed purpose of writing about my depression and my bad days. I very carefully avoided any possibility of my name being attached to it. Created a new email address for it, used no names, never mentioned it to a single friend, did not share links on social media. The people who found it, who found me there, were people who identified with the topics, the subject matter, the tags I used. I stopped posting there ages ago (abandoning a blog for not the first time). It’s still there though. I didn’t delete it. But no, I will not tell you what it was called or how to find it. There are still things on that blog I could never stand certain people to read. Ever.
All that being said, I have decided to try this again. This public blogging thing. Obviously. Being as open and honest I can stand to be.
Amanda Haimoto Rudd 