Keeping private things private

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

I don’t think you can be a blogger in the early noughties if you aren’t prepared to post intimate details about your relationships, friendships, family matters, and personal drama. I know I did—I overshared many times. Back then blogs became online personal diaries because none of us anticipated that internet would grow to be this far-reaching and we don’t even know how “digital footprint” would turn out to be.

Thinking of all the things I’ve posted over the years in my old blog gives me that sense of embarrassment that I now wonder what people who’ve read it must’ve been thinking at that time. I post pictures, I don’t hide names, I don’t redact information. I post when I’m upset and angry in the heat of the moment. I just write it all out. No filter. In its truest raw form. 

After realizing this faux pas, I immediately archived my old blog because it’s a buffet of TMI in there. And even when I try to be careful on this newer blog, there are times that I am still guilty of telling people too much information about my life more than I should.

I guess this is the very reason why I don’t update much on this site anymore. I don’t want to blog about every single thing that’s going on with me. Aside from the fact that my life is kinda boring compared to most people, many just don’t care anymore if I had a staycation, or if I’m seeing somebody now, or if I celebrated a family member’s birthday recently.

Surely, in recent years I have been very careful about what I put online for everyone to see. I no longer want to invite unwanted attention from people who hardly know me and who just happen to land on my site for whatever reason. It leaves people the chance to judge and criticize me just by what they see on the surface.

Not everyone who reads what you post will hope for the best. Over time you’ll realize that some people aren’t exactly there to cheer for you. Some will secretly hope for your failure to prove whatever point they have. Some will just hate their fictional versions of me—and I’m not saying this because of some perceived “main character complex”—but because this is so true. 

There were times when my posts caused misunderstandings. A lot of what I posted in the past turned out to be quite controversial for some and it had become detrimental to both my personal and professional life at times. There were even rumors that I didn’t get the promotion I was eyeing many years back just because of my online presence “noise”. 

Imagine your writings becoming some sort of ammunition against you. 

I know I might have overshared before because I wanted attention, validation and sympathy. I wanted to be relatable to people. But if there’s something I regret from the two decades of blogging is my loss of privacy. Time has taught me that pouring my feelings only made me more vulnerable. That while this is my void, I’m not totally safe out here.  

So for people who come here to check for my life update, I don’t think you can see much of it here. Let me do the updates on Twitter and IG—which I now placed on private yet again because it is only privy to the very few people who bothered to follow me there. I’m not saying every single one of them followed me with good intentions, but at least what goes on with my life now is limited to a few.