The notion of an online journal has always bugged me. For me, keeping a journal is very private, hence I usually write my deepest thoughts and feelings in my journals/sketchbooks rather than on a blog that is opened to anyone on the web. Somehow, the sense of having a private journal online just seemed to be in conflict with my ego. (going off the idea that I usually let my shadow out in my journals.) However, for the premise of this class, and to further my personal ethics development, (fufu) I will try to be more private in this blog.
I used to keep a more personal blog in high school, however I realized as I become older, it becomes increasingly harder to share personal feelings with people. I don't know because I am just more busy, or society often requires us to put on an independent and strong character. I remember there was even a point in my life when lookign at the old high school posts made me feel weak and even immature because I have silly, unresolved emotional fixations. Yet, looking back at them now, I realized that was exactly who I was, not weak or immature, just me growing up and coping with life. I have also realized it is also a part of me that I love, yet somehow is lost right now. This thought scares me. It has always scared me immensely to grow up. Sort of like a Peter Pan syndrome, I don't want to grow up. Growing up means more responsibility, more reality to face, and things can seem so lackluster, easily be taken for granted, and hopeless at times. I longed to keep the care-free self, the one with my head stuck in the clouds all day, enjoying life as it is.... Now really growing up, I am trying to find a balance between the two, trying to still have the curiosity and appreciation of a child and the maturity and firmness of an adult. I think some part of me must of hated adults when I was young... :}
All in all, I will be trying to utilize these exercises to help me reflect more personally, since this is the whole premise of keeping a journal for this class...There will still be a couple layers between ego and shadow...but just less layers I suppose? haha
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For me it is quite the opposite, as you already know; in fact I find that it is easier to share my personal feelings with people nowadays because I am a little bit more comfortable with breaking out of my shell nowadays and becoming my vulnerable girl-self.
ReplyDeleteAnd, I am currently still the care-free self with head stuck in the clouds all day xD. I have no self-restraint and way too much free time.
I think keeping a public blog fulfills the same effects as a private journal; but with the side-effect that it is possible to give people a window into your soul. Since I am always so extremely open with myself, this obviously makes sense to me, but for others it may perhaps be not, since it is too limiting to have to restrict the kind of thoughts that you can put out.
I guess it is a bit of a sacrifice to make a blog public. But such a sacrifice makes sense to me. I know how it can feel to have such a window into a person's life, and to be honest I miss a lot of that--it is sometimes harder to connect with people on that level nowadays. If I can share that feeling with maybe one or two other people, then perhaps I will have made someone's day, or have them think about interesting things. And for me that is worth it; because the prospect of reaching out to people in that way is one that resonates very strongly with who I am.
At the same time, some things are "too meaningful" or close to heart to put in a public blog, for one reason or another. And there is also the fact that writings tend to resonate with people more if they can relate to them personally. So, while it is nice for people to get a window into a part of me that they might not understand, many of my posts nowadays are a little more general thought-provoking ones that people can associate with more directly.
My own attitude toward sharing personal details has gone through some serious changes. I've never "journaled" in the strict sense, except when it's been required for classes (although I suppose the recent increase in my Facebook note posting frequency comes close), and I've never had a MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, or most any other bloggerish device. I only used Twitter once, and that was for a very specific reason. For the foreseeable future, I think I'll stick to Facebook--it's not that I mind the idea of random strangers being able to read what I write, but my experience with the Internet at large is that most writings and responses by strangers are not worth considering. Few people will claim they are good at drawing pictures, but if the Internet is any indication, even fewer know how to write well, or at the very least, are willing to put in the effort to create a respectable product. Although there is still a lot of noise on Facebook, I find it on the whole much more thoughtful and relevant than the Internet as a whole simply because it involves people I know.
ReplyDeleteIn the past (by which I mean more than a year or two ago), I was much more reluctant to share my feelings about things. Probably two main factors contributed to this. First was the nature of my troubled relationship with my roommate, which I believe I've detailed in other postings. Second, and more generally, is culture. Stereotypically, for a male to talk about his feelings goes against societal expectations, and it seems this is especially true in the Asian cultures (at least in my experience--I suppose it's possible my family is just weird). Any number of rationales have been proposed for this--we don't want to look weak, we don't want to burden others (a major one for me), it's simply not proper for a male, it's not polite in general (another major one for me), and so forth. In any case, although I'm still not completely free from it, I now see it as a really harmful attitude when taken too far. I mean, it's good to have some degree of emotional independence, but when nobody has any idea what's going on inside you, you get trapped. In this respect I've had the opposite experience--I would say I'm becoming a more open person in terms of sharing my feelings, though this still has some ways to go.
Like you, I've mostly looked upon growing up with fear. Even more than the increases in explicit responsibility, the most stressful parts of growing up for me were an explosion in the level of my expectations for myself, and an increased awareness of how badly and in how many ways things can go wrong (even if only a small subset of them have actually happened to me). So would I say I was happier as a child? I think it's a bit of a trick question--on one hand, while we had fewer responsibilities, expectations, and worries as children, I suspect this was exactly because we didn't have the ability to appreciate it. I would go so far as to say that my ability to appreciate things has improved as I've grown, and I imagine that it's the same for other people. Even if it's not as tangible as the negatives, it's just as important. Besides (at the risk of sounding really depressing), it's not like I haven't had bad experiences as a child in addition to the good, even if was over things that sometimes seem silly in retrospect.
Overall, I don't really think adults are fundamentally different from children; if I may use a physics term, there's no sharp phase transition. It seems to me that, on the negative side, our problems are simply more complicated, and we've become better at distracting, confusing, pretending, repressing, and lying to ourselves and others, and on the positive side, more able to generate and appreciate subtlety. I'm reminded of a joke I once heard about international relations--there's this student who wants to know the secret to international relations, so they ask more and more esteemed diplomats what the secret to international relations is, but nobody can tell them what it is. Finally they reach the most senior ambassador, who tells them that the secret to international relations is that nobody knows anything about international relations.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm kind of rambling, so I'll stop here :p