Putting it all together

By kate on May 9th, 2007

A colleague of mine, upon reading something I wrote on my website several years ago, referred to it as a “blog post”. Suddenly, something clicked in my mind and I realized that most of what was on my website could be considered blog posts. This may seem obvious, but it never occurred to me because they were written before “blogging” became the popular word for it.

I had been feeling guilty lately about the fossil that my personal website had become, with no updates at all since 2004, and no regular updates since around 2000. When blogger Kate Trgovac of mynameiskate.ca offered to buy my domain a few months ago, I couldn’t blame her for offering because it looked abandoned. I’d been actively using the domain for things like email and private web pages, but you couldn’t tell from the public site.

In the interim, I’d been keeping a LiveJournal or two in order to target my posts to friends. Immediately, I realized that I could combine the (old but good) content of my personal website with the entries from LiveJournal into one cohesive, living whole!

A large part of the effort I spent on this consolidation was mental. For a long time, I had a mindset borne out of being a young woman on the internet when the internet was a lot less crowded. I never posted my full name or any clear pictures of my face. I obscured details about my life to deter potential stalkers and people I knew from discovering me. This new site is a sloppy amalgam of personal information, and I’m trying to stop worrying about that. These are some of the things I worried about:

Stalkers. This was more of a concern several years ago when I was younger and single, and there weren’t as many women online. Now, the odds of a creepy internet stalker choosing me (a married mother in my 30s) is low, I think.

Family. I kept my LiveJournal separate so I could target certain thoughts to my friends, and others who share my social and political views. It’s a tough transition to let it all hang out here (hi, Mom!). I’ve decided it’s just part of being an adult and it’s not my job anymore to protect my family from my ideas.

Colleagues. The LiveJournal was also separate so I could present my personal website as a professional face (albeit with a personal bent). I never lost track of the possibility of a potential boss or co-workers reading my site. However, after over two years of working in the social networking space, I’ve found that my colleagues and I have become connected through our personal journals and blogs (and even LiveJournals), and that the line between personal and professional is becoming blurred.

At the same time, I’ve matured into someone who worries less about acting how others want me to act, and more about developing my own actual personality. All these old blog posts reveal a three-dimensional image of who I am, and I’m ready to stand behind that, instead of hiding behind multiple, somewhat anonymous, online masks.