Week 2: When your life becomes someone else

Over the course of the past few years I have always kept a journal. Not quite a diary as I rarely wrote Dear diary followed by a page of my thoughts and feelings of the moment. However I always kept a journal full of lists and poems and doodles and thoughts. And when I look back on them I remember moments I had forgotten poems about people I liked or lists of what to pack for my Florida trip. And it felt like a small log into my life. Sometimes I like to post online a poem or talk about something that is going on in my life. And although it can be nice to get all the nice comments from people you don't know that well. It is also hard as once you put that out there its not yours anymore. Many people talk about how writing a book or making a song and putting it out for the world to see is letting it go. It is now not yours solely where only you can judge it, it becomes everyone else's. Now it is theirs to interpret and judge. This is why many people portray a fake persona online, it is much easier to live an altered version of yourself for others than live your authentic self online for others to judge and ridicule. But at the same time this is what people find most appealing, we love reading others journals because we get a peak into their mind. We get to someone being genuine which can be quite difficult to find particularly in a digital space. People love genuine people online however it is hard to be that genuine person as then you are partially living for others and they're validation or ridicule of you. This is why I would argue that most people are not writing in the natural stream of consciousness
way. Although it is one of my personal favorite ways to write it is messy and unpolished and dosen't always make sense. Diary entry's are much more organized and thought out. However I do think that with Diary's its okay to have misspelled words and a list of all the people you hate and that is perfectly fine, that is what a diary is for. However once it goes over to an online platform that changes. Those thoughts are no longer just for you they are now for a collection of people. So although there can still be an occasional spelling mistake or a random thought or two. Talking about people in a negative way online becomes a different much more abrasive things I don't condone. Those feelings could get back to the person there talking about and can cause much more harm than good.