Blogging is dangerous

I’ve tried to keep journals and diaries since I was a kid, and in every single one, I lie. The innate secrecy of those books (most of which are blank halfway through, because I can’t keep them up) causes me to fictionalize, leave out, redact my thoughts and feelings. Take my childhood diary, which is filled with boy crush after boy crush, yet nothing about my suicide fantasies, about the fights with girls, about always feeling left out or just on the edge of fitting in. When I wrote in that book about losing my virginity, I redacted most of the experience–and I lied about how I felt about it. I protected myself because I knew that someone might find the writing. I was right, because my brother stole my diary and shared it with the neighborhood kids. It was awful.

You’d think that I’d be more closed off in this public space. More careful.

This space is about me, about how I’m feeling at the moment, thinking (or likely, obsessing) about at the moment. I share my thoughts and feelings and life with people who stumble upon or seek out this site in an attempt to authentically speak my truth. I lay myself out bare here sometimes. I’m working my shit out in public.

I admit that I forget occasionally that people I work with may read my blog. Also, family members. Maybe my ex–I don’t know. I try to keep it secret from him. Sometimes when I look at my Google Analytics and I see that people often search for human being blog to get here, I wonder who it is and who told them about my blog. I know that everything I write on the Internet is permanent, that even though I don’t use my last name here it’s not that hard to figure out who I am with a little creative searching. I know that what I write here can come back and bite me in the ass. Blogging can be dangerous.

Take my conversation with my boss at the end of a recent weekly meeting: She told me that she had been at a national meeting, and someone pulled her aside and told her a friend of hers reads my blog, and that I’d written negative stuff about my job recently. Now my boss is great, and she told me that she’s a big believer in freedom of speech and doesn’t care what I’m writing on my personal website. Great news, right? However, she said if, say, someone in our leadership read that I’m dissing my job, they might not be too pleased. She wasn’t telling me to censor myself necessarily, but cautioning me that maybe I’m not as anonymous as I think I am, and I might want to think twice before I publish something here that could hurt me professionally.

I just finished reading Jen Lancaster’s Bitter is the New Black, a memoir about that blogger’s year of unemployment. Lancaster did not get hired for a job because of her blog content. Now she was specifically dissing all the companies who had not hired her or responded to her applications–companies that would be potential clients in this job she was seeking. Yeah, I think that was pretty dumb of her to do. And Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com was famously fired over her blog content. Both of these bloggers are snarky. Armstrong specifically got fired for snarking about her coworkers and her company.

I believe I’m really careful about what I write about work here. But am I careful enough?

The blog in question is one I wrote a couple of weeks ago. In that blog, I wondered whether my job is a good fit for me now. I honestly wrote about my feelings about my place in the organization. If asked, I would say the same things to my boss. In fact, I have.

Does what I wrote about how I feel about my job mean I’m not grateful to have it, especially in this economy? Or that I’m not dedicated to doing the best job possible? No. Does that mean that I want to get fired (no) or quit (maybe)? Could what I write here come back to bite me in the ass like it did Lancaster and Armstrong? Yes.

Unlike in my diaries, I don’t lie here. I do refrain from writing about Steve’s son, because he’s not mine to write about, and at age 12 he deserves privacy. I don’t write much about Lauren and parenting here because this is not a mommy blog. I write about my relationship to Steve in some capacity, but there are many things that are off limit, including our sex life. I don’t snark about others, because I loathe snark. I am not a mean person. And, snark means the blog is about those people.

This blog is about me, and how I feel. Not about them. My job is a big part of my life, and right now, I’m feeling quite unsettled about it. So I will probably be writing about how I feel as I explore, but this situation makes me cautious. If I start a job search, I won’t be writing about it because that could be cutting my own throat. (Or maybe, I’ll write it in a password-protected post, which you’re welcome to ask me to unlock for you.) I won’t write anything here that I wouldn’t say to my boss if asked. (Or to anyone else I write about–that’s my litmus test: If I can’t say it to your face, I won’t write it here in a public post.)

It’s odd that the woman who went to my boss didn’t come to me. She knows me too. That’s the most upsetting part of all this. However, I acknowledge that it’s out of my control. It’s also slightly embarrassing that my boss talked to me about it. I spent hours worrying that I should delete that entry, and that I shouldn’t write about work at all. I wound up password protecting the post.

This blog is about me being honest with myself, feeling my feelings, and working my shit out. All personal bloggers take a risk in doing what we do. This situation is a good reminder that, even as I think my only readers are strangers, what I write here may have consequences, even if it’s only a little embarrassment.