honesty vs openness

I've been thinking, lately, about honesty and openness, and how that pertains to my blog.

I am always honest; I am not necessarily always entirely open.

That should be no surprise. This blog is a public space, and I aspire to behave professionally in public spaces, so I don't, for example, allow myself to be a prat. I'm also a pathological introvert, who can take the concept of me-time and privacy to a rather extreme degree. So there are things I won't share online, because they don't belong here, or because I don't want to be cavalier about the privacy of others.

But lately I've been thinking that some part of my approach is actually just … bad habit. More and more, it's come to feel as if I'm hiding. I don't talk about what's important to me, I avoid talk of politics or feminism or religion — for fear of alienating people, for fear of speaking clumsily, for fear of claiming space for myself. For fear. Then, when things go wrong, or life happens, I can't post because I can't talk about them, which simply contributes to the stigma keeping me silent in the first place.

I'm not sure what the finer points of my new approach will be. I'm not going to change my personal rules on behaving professionally in public spaces. But I am going to experiment with pushing my boundaries of what is and isn't private.