Current mood:

paranoid

Temporary Security
Some days I worry about privacy. The interiority of my life—more than most of my friends, more than most of my relatives, perhaps more than I know about me— is online. There is a blithe blindness in writing publicly. I am not considering the friends of the friends who potentially have access to this, the person who found this on a computer’s browsing history I forgot to delete, or the people who will track me down years from now.

Yet, when I stop to censor myself, to narrow the broad range of topics, to eliminate this or that person from today’s rant because my words may get back to them, it feels as if fetters are locking themselves over my wrist. I don’t want to be prudent; I want to write as if this were a cheap diary with a lock that I hid in my underwear drawer. It is not satisfying otherwise.

Instead I tell myself that there are so many people online, so many things to do, and so little time. I don’t imagine anyone could be particularly interested in stalking me.

So wrote the girl who posted her address online, the suicidal boy who transferred sophomore year, or the high school freshman who described her fantasies about her crush in explicit detail. No one seemed to care in real life, and it seemed impossible that anyone would bother to read them online, so they described their lives in morbid detail.

I read their blogs, waded through pages of bad writing and spelling mistakes written by people I barely knew, because I found it fascinating to watch their masks crumble to pieces on their faces.

Columnists like Anna Quindlen have written articles mourning the disappearance of privacy for the internet generation. I’m not sure how I feel. In high school I shared my blog with school mates. Most of the people I knew well did not read it. Somehow though, I got to know a small circle of people whom I never would have imagined befriending: upperclassmen I was too shy to talk to, underclassmen I had no classes with, people I liked but somehow never saw. I’m still in touch with several of them now. I love hearing from them, I read their updates, and I think about them from time to time. I hope they are doing well.

Sharing blogs with my college friends has allowed us to describe the details of our lives, capture the intensity of our emotions in the moment, or just rant about or day, at our own convenience. The key to relationships is time: time to sit down and talk over lunch, time to check in with each other, and that doesn’t happen often. Being able to read what’s going on in each other’s lives prevents us from falling out of touch when we don’t see each other.

Yet, I am worried about the day I slip up- perhaps I already have- and an employer reads something bad and fires me, or a friend of a friend of a friend that I wrote about somehow gets this address and reads something cruel I wrote about them, years and years ago.

What I really worry about though, is vulnerability. In my last blog a couple people left vitriolic anonymous notes that stung for months afterwards. I worry what I post is too honest, too full of emotion, and I have just sauntered naked across the screen for everyone and their pet elephant. Then one day, when I am comfortably ensconced in my post as mayor of New York, all of this will come out and my career will crash. Or that you, right now, are judging me. Are you the boy who sits next to me in class? Do you laugh when I write about despair because I know nothing about despair?

We are taught not to cry in public when we are small. It is loud, it embarrasses our parents, and it disturbs other people. Rather, we must put our best foot forward, learn to shake hands with a firm grip, and perfect our smile for the camera because the moment we are born we are entered into a grand competition for resources in the world: food, shelter, and the means to obtain more of each.

We are told to practice impression management because it will help us during interviews. We learn to present our best self, gloss over our mistakes and failures, and focus on moments when we have outshone everyone else around us. The result is a toxic cycle where everyone constantly feels outshone and constantly tries to outshine everyone else. People around me still talk about their SAT scores.
“Ooh man, I studied so hard and it paid off. I got a 750 on math.”
“Really? I took it cold and got a perfect score on math.”
“Oh, well, you know I didn’t study that much. Besides, they gave me a scholarship. Pretty awesome.”
“Sadly, I’m not eligible for a scholarship. My family makes too much money.”

Similarly, it becomes natural to snap something sarcastic at someone who hurts our feelings instead of saying: “You hurt my feelings,” because feelings make us vulnerable.

No wonder blogs are so compelling. It’s a relief to know how vulnerable everyone is behind the impervious iron smiles that go up every day. It’s a relief to know that other people are just like you: more vulnerable, fragile and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.

It’s also a relief because now you have blackmail material on them.

I am going friends only this summer for my internship.* Please leave a note if you've been lurking, and you'd like me to friend you.


*Mostly because I have a bad bad feeling that during my last internship my boss could have/maybe/probably did read this.



"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
-Benjamin Franklin