Naked blogging is dead. Long live naked blogging!

My kids are watching Simpsons re-runs and I just promised them I'd take them somewhere - anywhere, if they'd let me get this written. If I don't write on my blog for more than a few days I get antsy and skittish. A lot of you know that if I don't write here for a few days, there's something wrong. A lot of you know me very well. It's strange and also cool and very weird.

I asked if anybody had any blogging questions .. everyone asked the same thing. "How do you feel about writing personal things on your blog?"

Why does anyone write such personal things onto the internet ... broadcast them for the world to see? The babyboomers are aghast, muttering behind their hands. "Have you SEEN??"

I wrote my first blog post almost five years ago. Under an assumed name, to document my IVF process. Shit happened, man. But the one defining thing for me is that when I very first started writing on the net, it was anonymously. It must have set the tone for my writing. When you're anonymous, you don't care what you say.

I didn't care what I said ... and I had a LOT to say. It wasn't your normal infertility blog, not at all. A few months into my stilted start on the internet, I read about the term "naked blogging." Oh shit. I'll have to delete everything.

See Jonathan Fields post on strip blogging HERE.

I kept writing anyway. When I was a kid my sisters friends used to call me "the shadow." I was meek and weak and let people walk all over me. (Sometimes I imagine travelling back through time to when I was young, punching and headbutting people who would squish me down. The surprise! I wouldn't be scared at all. I used to be so scared.)

Maybe my timid weakness back then is directly proportionate to the roar I have now. To have a voice was kind of empowering and I liked it. I wrote about being pregnant with Rocco in 2007 and 2008, and interspersed it with stories of my past and the shit I'd done. I had maybe a hundred readers. It was fucking cool. Sometimes I'd feel weird and not write, then get an email from some chick in Tennessee who felt weird about emailing me but did it anyway. To tell me she connected with my words so much, and thanked me, and told me to never stop writing. When people tell me their own stories back to me? That they don't have a blog and never will because they're too scared? That's why I keep writing.

I accidentally blogged pieces of flesh and bone into the computer screen. Shards of teeth and cracks of pain. Life is a bullshit seething mass of humanity! It's beautiful!

I blogged through my husbands cancer diagnosis and chemo. How he was a beige turdburger. How pissed off I was that chicks weren't perving on him in the street anymore. How badly I was struggling with a crying baby. How thirsty I was. (Very.)

Instead of shutting my blog down ... I only wrote more, in my real name. Before I wrote the Compelling post, I knew I couldn't write it and publish it. It's in a rulebook somewhere. So I wrote it and published it. Thank you, for commenting on it .. I haven't read the post since I wrote it, but I have read all of the amazing comments.

I may make some people feel uncomfortable when I cut too close to the bone. If my blog was an ecstasy tablet, I'd be peaking right now. If my blog was Eminem's career, I'm right about in the middle of the Recovery album. If my blog was a potters clay, you'd almost be able to see the finished piece but still need to iron and smooth out a lot of the kinks.

If my blog was Bill Hick's standup comedy routine, I'm when he travelled to the UK and branched out and started to realise a lot of shit.

There's a finite number of blog posts left in me. But I'm not done yet.

I joke about it a lot, but I honestly have come too far to turn back now. Even if I did delete it all, it's always going to be there. I lose out on jobs because potential employers google my name. I get odd looks when I pick my kids up from places. I've been hiding from people my entire life, scared and worried about what they think. I'm sick of it. I used to keep my recovery people separate from my school mum people separate from my online people.

Now, everybody knows everything.

I still am the shadow. I only care what two people think of me ... those two people are having a punch-up on the couch right now and Smithers is releasing the hounds.

I know who I am because I wrote it here. The strangest thing.

Do you care what people think? What's your favourite blogging style? And who's your favourite Simpson?

EDITED TO ADD: I do care about what people think. I just don't let what I think they think control my life. And I try to be appropriate in my blog posting. Knowing what's ok to say and what's not is kind of important. I don't like this post at all now and wish I'd written something cute about my kids instead. With pictures, and funny ditties.




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