To Share, or Not to Share? My Biggest Blog Dilemma

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I've been blogging for a couple of years now, and I think I'm hooked. Blogging is fun, it's creative, it's often cathartic. And it forces me to write more often, which is great since I am a procrastinator by nature and I need that little nagging voice telling me, "You haven't posted anything in two weeks, girl! Write something already so your blog doesn't stagnate like middle-class wages!"

Many bloggers write emotional exposés, baring their souls naked to the public. I don't mind when other people do that. I like reading them, for the most part (though there's always some that truly over-share, describing ad nauseum every single thing that passes through their head. I'm like, seriously, if I wanted that, I'd just go read Twilight again).

But I have trouble baring my own soul. It's just not my style. Outside of my family and best friends, I'm a fairly private person. I have never craved attention. I'm not necessarily comfortable disclosing intimate details of my life with total strangers. Call it insecurity, call it self-consciousness, whatever, but it's there. There's something about baring my soul publicly that feels insufferably emo to me.

So what's a privacy-loving blogger to do??

Privacy Is Passé, Right?

I suppose I could just throw in the towel and bare it all on a regular basis.

Pros:

• Great payoff requires great risk. Tapping into some deeper stuff may make for better writing. Some of my favorite blogs are the ones whose writers go into great detail about what they think and feel. I think it's cool to get inside somebody else's head and realize either how very different, or how very much the same we are inside. But if I'm going to do that myself, I need to get past some stuff.
• I need to get over myself. I may be too shy and self-conscious for my own good. If something about myself is going to make for an entertaining or relatable blog post, why hold back? Maybe I'm afraid people will laugh at me, middle-school style. But that's the chance you take when you do anything in public, even walk down the street. Dwelling on that possibility is no way to live your life.
• Words are all I've got. Readers are not gonna get to know me through body language or any of that face-to-face stuff, nor through video, cuz I'm super camera shy (see above about insecurities). My blog won't be truly mine unless I can share what's in my head.
• Blogs live forever. When I kick the bucket one day, my blog will be a permanent record of myself for anyone to find if they choose to. I don't think it's egomaniacal of me to think that my kids or grandkids might want to read some of it. If my own grandmother or grandfather had had a blog, would I want to read it? Hell yeah, I would. It would be like reading letters or postcards that they wrote back when they were young. I'd be fascinated.

Cons:

• Over-sharing grates against my nature. For me, writing true emotional exposés on my blog would be akin to flashing my boobs in public. I can share something, but not everything. Privacy is an endangered species—why should I contribute to its demise? I'm horrified enough that I'm caught on camera 800 times a day by the various recording devices in my environment (storefronts, store interiors, the bus, the train, the office building lobby, random tourists with camera phones on Michigan Avenue). It's bad enough that anybody on the internet can look me up and find my address and other details about me (public records). Why would I share even more stuff voluntarily?
• There's no place to hide. Fiction writers may very well be baring their souls in their novels, but they can hide behind their fictional characters and events. Blogs, not so much. If it's your blog, then it's all you, baby, and everybody knows it.  
• Blogs live forever. I often want to write about my kids, but I don't, because I think to myself, "What if they read this one day and say 'MOM, TMI! I did not need to know that you hated my guts and fantasized about shipping me off to a gulag camp when I was a teenager!'" I think this sometimes when I read my favorite "mommy blogs." For instance, I adore Baby Sideburns and she cracks me up like no other. But I wonder what her kids will think when they grow up and read about how she called them assholes all the time. Don't get me wrong, little kids absolutely CAN be assholes. But would you say it to their faces?

From a writing standpoint, sharing "just enough" is a welcome challenge. It's tough to balance "Have I shared enough to make this piece worthwhile?" with "Am I OK with this piece living online forever?"

I'll probably end up somewhere in between baring nothing and baring it all. It's not like I have to go to either extreme. But even taking it up a notch is going to require some effort on my part.

Deep breath... time to take myself out of my comfort zone.