Caveats

The problem with writing a memoir in a public forum is that it is public. I started to write a post last night, and realized that I really have to think about others' privacy when posting my thoughts. Most of my family and friends would not want even positive's posted in public. Our little circle has not yet succumbed to the current trend of sharing intimate details of our lives with complete strangers. While we do some social networking, it is of the innocuous variety. None of us live our lives virtually, we are still old fashioned in that way. In fact, it makes me uncomfortable when something that should be private is made public on the internet, whether it is connected to me or not. That makes creating an online journal about my personal experiences and thoughts uncomfortable too. Yet it seemed to me to be a solution to a couple of problems. 1) I have a hard time writing things out long hand, because my brain is faster than my writing. It gets frustrating. Sometimes my hand catches up to my brain, only to find that my brain has forgotten the thought I wanted to write down! 2) I have a hard time keeping a journal saved on my hard drive, since I tend to be hard on my computers. Keeping it online seems to be the answer to both, but as soon as you put something online, it has the potential for becoming public, whether it is intended to be public or not. So, while writing in this forum, I will be careful, trying to express my thoughts without violating anyone's trust or my own privacy. There was a time when I would have thoughtlessly shared without considering others' feelings, but thankfully have come to know better. It wasn't that other peoples' feelings were not important to me. On the contrary, I have always cared deeply about how other people feel. It just never occured to me that if someone told me something, or shared an experience with me, that they would mind if I shared with someone else. It was a hard lesson learned for me. This journal is not meant to be a place to post gossip. What I see as an anecdote to be remembered cannot turn into something that may cause harm. So, I will be very careful in what I post. I have a couple of drafts pending and will post those as soon as I have rewritten them to take into account the privacy of others.