On Blogging and Moving

I thought for a long time about starting a blog.  Cindy Lynn had been blogging for a while already and we’d had a fun family blog going for a couple of years.  In the end I decided that having my own blog would be the perfect place to keep track of what I was thinking and what we were doing.

I was unprepared for how much I would love it.  I was also unprepared to find out that people knew that I had started a blog, and were reading it.  It felt so strange.  The connections were good and I enjoyed them.  But there was also the feeling of awkwardness that now anyone might be reading my thoughts and I would never know.

In the years since those first posts I have loved having a blog.  It has challenged me to write out my ideas more thoroughly (conclusions, how I hate you!), provided a place for me to record things I would otherwise forget, and has now started to segue into books that are a treasure to our family.  It has had unexpected benefits and a few unexpected frustrations.  From time to time someone has surprised me by mentioning that they read my blog (I should really blog sometime about how I got the best calling ever because of my blog, shouldn’t I) but for the most part I know it’s just a handful of friends reading and a few unidentified strangers. 

And then we moved.

Until today, I haven’t even used the word blog around a single person in Oregon.  (I was dying to show my friend a picture of Jared's most awesome Halloween costume ever.  So I pulled it up, and showed her, and then closed it again.)  Russ is surprised by my reticence.  I’m surprised by how complicated my feelings about the whole thing are.  It’s like I have this whole on-line part of my life that no one in Oregon knows about, but that I’m not sure I’m ready to share.

You see, for the most part when my friends in North Carolina started reading my blog, they already knew me.  They already knew that I think too much and talk too much, and do some things excessively and some things not enough.  When my unknown friends read my blog, well whatever they felt they didn’t tell me about it, so I didn’t worry about it too much.

But this?  This is totally different.  We are here to stay.  (For the foreseeable future, anyway.)  And we are strangers, just starting to get to know people.  Showing people my blog feels like having no holds barred, being completely exposed.  I know I’m mostly that way in real life, but somehow in person it’s in smaller quantities and feels more manageable.

I don’t know how this will turn out.  I’ve seriously considered going private, though Russ is voting against that.  It may turn out that it doesn’t matter anyway because the demographic in my ward here is enough older that maybe most of the women wouldn’t be interested in reading blogs.  Or maybe one day I’ll just be in a mood and throw caution to the wind and tell everyone.  (Not very likely.)  All I know is that of all the things I expected to be complicated when we moved, this was not one of them…