You seem to have a nice balance in sharing yourself on a personal level with sharing fun stuff (if that makes sense - you’ve got a healthy separation, it seems). Did you find that hard? What kind of questions do you ask yourself before you talk about things on your blog, esp personal things?

First: thank you! It is indeed a real challenge to give enough on the blog to make it relevant and real and informative, but not so much that I feel over-exposed or vulnerable. Certainly back in the early days I was much more open on the blog. I remember when a day with 20 hits was a big day for me, and I mostly followed that classic Gertrude Stein quote, “I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear readers, are an afterthought.” Of course soon I realized that friends and family were reading, and I had to shift my thinking a bit.

There were some bumps on the road —

A friend’s girlfriend searched for his name on my blog, and found a reference to a past dalliance he’d had with another friend of mine. Andreas took offense to some references I’d made to our, ahem, intimate affairs. I once wrote online about a high school classmate being drunk at our reunion, and got an email from his mother saying I should take it down because he was applying for jobs as a teacher and it popped up on google.

You might assume then that I would spend the most time worrying about what my parents might read, what my friends might see, etc, but when I sit down to write something, the people who are actually the most on my mind are my coworkers — past, present and future. If there’s something I wouldn’t want to talk about at work, then it doesn’t go on the blog.

Obviously this means I don’t write about work stuff — that’s pretty much a blogger standard. But there’s other stuff, too.
Yes, people I work with know I’m sort of a weirdo and my blog is a litmus for prospective employers: if you can’t deal with Electrolicious, you probably wouldn’t like working with me (nor I you).

But there are some things that I just don’t want to talk about in casual conversation, and so I imagine myself standing around a water cooler at work, and would I want to talk to my boss about how wasted I got at Shambhala? Do I want to explain the nuances of the surgery I had this summer to someone I pass in the hall? Do I want my office mate knowing about how I cried myself to sleep one night before because I felt hopeless and existential? Uh, no.

This split between public/private has actually been a big issue for me, and one I’ve discussed with a therapist. I’ve thought a lot about the nuances between feeling like I’m keeping secrets and merely keeping my personal life private. Blogging for so many years and the accompanying micro-notoriety has kind of fucked with my head in some weird ways, and made me oddly sympathetic to the bat-shit insanity that many mainstream public figures seem to experience. Attention and exposure are intoxicating and wonderful and can be oddly damaging if you’re not careful. I’ve experienced this on a teeny tiny microscopic level, and it’s made me realize that being actually famous would fuck with your mind in ways that I can’t even imagine.

One result is that I’ve developed an oddly proprietary reflex about certain parts of my life. I’m SO open and transparent about so much, but the parts that are just for me and my friends and family are closely guarded. I get pissy with real-life friends who assume that they know what I’m up to if they read Electrolicious, because I leave the truly personal, treasured stuff off the blog.

Interestingly, I’m always rewarded for opening up. The posts that make me feel the most vulnerable are inevitably the posts that get the most reader responses. I’m thinking here of Tackle Box Boys, Fat is a Feminist Issue, and The Inspirers. These were each hard posts to write and worrisome to publish, but in each case got lots of feedback. You might think this would encourage me to write more self-revelatory posts, but it’s a cheap high akin to flashing my emotionally-crusted panties in exchange for a few stares. I guess I think of it as short term benefit (lots of comments, hits, etc) vs. long term reward (credibility, respect).

And then of course there’s the dark side of exposing yourself online — the trolls and personal attackers. I avoided writing about my weight loss for AGES because I knew it would bring out the haters, and OH LORD, did it ever. Perhaps one of the most valuable skills blogging has given me is a ridiculously thick skin. I’ve gotten hateful attacks on just about every subject you can image (fat bitch! censoring cunt! sell-out whore! ugly toes! dyke mother! fag husband! I could go on and on and on and on) and the end result is that I’ve learned to usually accept criticism with grace and humility. No point in feeding the haters. I understand the concept of having your own personal collection of trainwreck blogs — the sites you read and love to hate. I know there are a few of you reading this right now who keep reading Electrolicious even though you quite obviously hate it and me. That’s fine. Just keep your hate to yourself. It’s sorta like the pee fetishists who got super into this post and sent me emails begging for more details. You can have whatever emotional response you want to my writing — I just don’t want to be bothered by certain kinds.

So, to get back to the original question: in terms of questions I ask myself before I start writing about personal things, it boils down to a few issues of integrity, really:

  • Do I want to talk to coworkers present and future about this?
  • If I’m writing about a specific person, could I print this out and hand it to them and feel good about standing there while they read it?
  • Does this open me up for attack in ways I don’t have the energy to deal with?
  • Is this something I want the world knowing about me?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I don’t write about the subject on Electrolicious. I write about it privately.