I've never really been a blog kind of person. I've been on and off with journalling over the years, but blogs have always felt... like a diary you know your mom is going to read. Something you write presumably for yourself but publicly. Why?
I've been thinking about home decorating lately. I've never been into it. I've been talking to my wife trying to figure out why. I asked her, "You walk into a couple's home, and they don't have anything. Their house is just empty. What do you feel?" and she said "Fear, because obviously they don't actually live here and I'm about to get murdered!"
There's this sense like, they could up and leave any minute. This isn't their home. But there's also this other element where they aren't showing you what's inside them. A home tells you something about a person, about their values and mental state, about their personality, about their daily life. An empty home is like looking into someone's eyes and having no idea what they're thinking or feeling. But you know something is wrong because the emptiness is so loud.
Some people are good at hiding the truth that is underneath, and that there IS a truth underneath. Their houses are like those modern IKEA homes. They look like a place someone lives, enough that you're not going to feel uncomfortable enough to start digging deeper. This is a normal person! As if that exists.
And then some people don't try to hide the truth. For some that means chaos, stuff piled everywhere, their inner chaos externalized. For others that means a comfy well cared for space that wherever you look you get a picture of the life they live here and what is important to them.
And I feel like we all have some mix of these. I tend toward emptiness, but can't help but make messes with the small amount of space I do let myself take up, my internal chaos showing through. In highschool my room was covered in writing on the walls, fake blood splattered everywhere. I never cleaned but I was tidy, so the space was covered in cobwebs like some unearthed tomb but you could move around okay.
What does this have to do with a blog? Well, a home is something you make for yourself, but with the idea that other people are going to be coming by. It makes you think twice. This space is mostly yours... but not quite all yours. To be completely open is to be vulnerable, maybe even inappropriately. But this is your space... you can't let others tell you how to live. This is the same tension I feel with blogs, and why I've avoided them. I'd rather be 100% me privately than 70% me with others.
But as time goes on I'm finding that being out in the world, I can learn a lot about myself through the interplay. About my boundaries. Where do I draw the line in my own vulnerability with the world? I share publicly some deeper things about myself, but in certain contexts where it's kind of an ephemeral space. But here online... I think this is the place where I could least be myself. This place where everything is archived and fed into LLMs, where anyone I know or don't know could be reading at any time.
So I guess this is the place where I can find out the outer limits of the shell that I build around my core. And I think for the first time I'm really understanding that this outer shell is okay. I would like one day to be whole, to the point where I can be most of myself everywhere I am. But even in a world where everyone was kind and caring... I would still wear clothes. To not would almost be to say that trust isn't important. And like you don't need to spend time with me to see me.
Why do I bring up clothes? I think they're another way of looking at this interplay between other and self. You live in your clothes so you want them to be comfy, and whether you want to or not you're choosing between self expression, self obfuscation, or projecting a sort of emptiness. I tend toward emptiness, wearing plain patternless t-shirts and pants. But unlike a home it's more outwardly oriented. It feels more about others than a home does. And fits more the idea of an "outer" shell than the home does. Your clothes and your home are metaphors for your boundaries.
In these metaphors, having no boundaries would be to be nude, or to be homeless. You're completely vulnerable to everyone. But interestingly... I think they all see you less than they would without the shell. Because the outer shell doesn't just hide what's underneath, it's also tells a story about what is underneath. It's a sort of language. And like language it can be used to lie, but it can also be used to share truths deeply and quickly.
To bring it back to the blog, I guess I'm writing a blog to find out how much of myself I express in a zero trust environment. To find out what I don't want to share, and what I do want to share, and how I can make that transmission of what I do want to share as efficient as possible so that you can see as much of me in a short amount of time as possible.