Converging

So I have been doing a lot of thinking lately around what kinds of things to share with the public, and what exactly is the right forum for discussing issues that are not clearly "professional" in nature, but that I think are important for people to talk about. I have also had a number of good conversations with friends around this topic and I realized that this discussion/thinking is really at the heart of my blog and why I started it in the first place.

All of this started when I did a post on this blog that was quite personal in nature and a friend of mine wrote me that I should take care about the things that discuss in a public domain. He didn't necessarily say I should not share, he just said that I should understand and craft the image that I am portraying to the world at large, and probably potential future employers/employees/investors.

This really bugged me at first. The post was talking about some lessons I learned about relationships, and I felt pretty strongly that people need to talk about these lessons in order for others to keep from making the same mistakes I made. I argued that it is precisely this fear of tarnishing our image that keeps us from sharing our mistakes, learning from them and helping our friends keep from making the same ones. Hence my post on Denial below.

I did battle with myself about how to proceed. Did I want to continue to share my values, hardships, lessons and big mistakes in such an openly searchable forum with my real name attached? Did I want to write anonymously? What was the image I was trying to portray to the world, to potential employers, to potential boyfriends, to whoever knows how to search for patricia sulick on google?

I realized that I was not ashamed of anything I had writen about. I was sometimes brutally honest, candid, and lets face it, when I make mistakes I like to make big ones that are pretty publicly humiliating and/or life changing (hey, go big or go home). But that being said, I had to think about what the people reading my blog would think of me, and whether I liked the potential consequences of that. Yes, people are quick to judge and bring to the table their biases and pre conceived notions. Humm....

I also realized that I had a huge opportunity in front of me. I am a bit shy in person. I am a terrible interviewer (and first date with someone I like). I am an introvert and I get nervious and that makes it hard to be myself and to share what I really think on the spot. I am generally much better at expressing myself after I have had time to think and usually better at writing down my thoughts than speaking them. Thus, my blog represented a really great opportunity for me to share things about myself and for people to get to know a little bit more about me in a forum that I was better with.

So I decided for the time to put the more personal posts in an anonymous blog and to think some more about how I wanted to weld this new found power...