Today, I saw a post on Facebook by Tara Stiles, linking to this post on her blog, and it resonated like whoa.
If I still kept one of those archive calendar things on the side of my blog, you’d see that I blog significantly less than I ever have. (Yet, I’m on track to have my biggest month ever this month – and I actually have a “Blog Less, Blog Better” post idea I’m still fleshing out that I hope to post soon.)
It’s equal parts time, vulnerability and peace.
Time: I have a lot more demands on my time than when I started this blog, between a busier job, Junior League, etc.
Vulnerability: I’ve put myself out there quite a bit on this site. Most of the time, the response has been great, but I won’t lie that some of the occasional stinging comments or things I’ve read about myself elsewhere don’t play a factor in what I do and don’t post.
Peace: I started this blog when I moved to NYC, 50 pounds heavier, working in a job I wasn’t crazy about. This blog filled a massive void in my life. It was a friend, a professional outlet, a personal outlet, a therapist, an accountability partner.
These days, I have more friends and acquaintance than I can keep up with, I lost weight and discovered a happy, fit lifestyle, and I have a job that I love. I have a regular fitness routine. I still love sharing the new fitness classes I try, new fitness products and any random Deep Thoughts with Theodora (/sarcasm font), but I don’t need to tell you about every workout the way I did when I first started blogging. Last summer, I was featured on Yahoo! for a survey Facebook did about fitness. Some of the comments I got were interesting: they were along the lines of “if you’re really/already fit, you don’t need to be/you aren’t talking about it all the time on social media.” An interesting follow-up study would be to see fitness level/experience with fitness of these people.
Tara talked in her post about oversharing skewing how we process events if we’re constantly thinking how we’ll tell the online story. I used to spend so much more time thinking: “how will I blog about this?” Now, I spend a lot more time in the moment and then think later if I’ll share it.
In an interview on The Everygirl, Grace from Stripes and Sequins talks about not wanting to blog full-time because it would take away some of the fun, and I agree. I do love that voyeurism of following other bloggers’ days, but right now, I can’t do that myself, and so when I do share, here or elsewhere, I want it to be something I just couldn’t resist telling you guys or something I absolutely want to record myself for posterity. (Sharing that I met Jillian Michaels or Will Ferrell was basically a reflex. I mean, obviously I was going to share that. I could NOT keep that to myself.)
Which I guess is a really long, convoluted way of saying that I nod my head to you, Ms. Stiles, because I’ve definitely been more cognizant of what I’m sharing, but even moreso, why.
On nights where I do have time to blog but don’t, I do spend some time thinking about what I could blog and typically shoot down a few ideas in my head because they feel hollow, and I don’t want to spend my free time writing here just for the sake of writing. I could make myself an editorial calendar, as I’ve advised those I’ve done blog consulting with, but I’m not trying to achieve any financial or readership goals through this blog right now. Sure, I’d like to make more money or have more people read this, but this is something I do for fun, so I want to keep it fun.
I went to NJ for part of this weekend, and had a great dinner with my parents and spent lots of time with my sweet, little baby cousin. I could have taken a million pictures of her, but I just took time in to snuggle and marvel at how big she’d gotten and how she’s still the damn cutest baby ever. I did take a beautiful photo of my mom and Lexi laughing with each other that’s such a beautiful moment between the three of us that I don’t think I could do it justice by trying to share the context here.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love social media, but just as I use it strategically professionally to meet certain goals, I am also using it strategically personally to make sure it adds to my life, rather than subtracts. And I know that compared to most people, I still do overshare online.
What about you? Do you share a lot online? Why do you share – and has it changed?
