i find it ironic that i put up tweets of a rather personal nature, which are read by essentially people i do not truly know except in mind, while the people i have met and vetted through facebook, i could never divulge anything i feel is personal. so in facebook, i put up witty statuses, the kind i feel is safe for everyone in my list to read (safe meaning it does not put me in a vulnerable position, or what i feel is one). i try not to put anything vague, unlikely anything negative, and virtually nothing related to work. on the other hand, i practically bare my soul on twitter (and here on this blog too, but not much these days).
i guess my point is that i have no problems opening up to people i am almost sure i would never meet (and if i do they will be a one-off meeting) but i am absolutely unable to do the same with people i see in my everyday life.
is it that i can only trust people from a distance? maybe. i do not care if you, the reader, knows that i am an emotional mess, because i don’t know you are reading this and if you are reading this and you know me in person as well, you are not likely to tell me, "hey, i read the other day about how you are an emotional mess. tell me more!" but i do care that i do not reveal such information to a person in front of me, or in my facebook because i might see that person some other time, because i don’t want to know that you know.
there are times when i want to express the negativity i am feeling. before, this place used to be my outlet. i hardly feel like doing so here now, though. i don’t feel the urge to log into my blog – the only reason you are reading this is because this platform has a email-to-blog feature which makes it seem less like blogging (at least, in the eyes of my colleagues at work).
so twitter it is (thanks to mobile internet). and yet, i don’t find it satisfying.
the truth is, i long to be able to open up to someone, face-to-face, without feeling like the biggest idiot in the world for feeling the way i do.
bloggerdygook 
Comments on: "tearing down the wall" (11)
I agree and echo everything in this post 100%.
[Hence the comment seeing I don’t comment much anywhere these days!]
As a bit more of an explanation, I’m not as personal on Twitter as I used to be as pretty much everyone I know reads Twitter. Twitter has [in addition to everything else] become a very local thing in the last year with meeting local people through Twitter and close friends starting to use it. I welcome the change, but it means I can’t as much say what I want any more.
Facebook is something I don’t use apart from keeping up with what everyone else does.
My blog has declined in readers so much that I’m somewhat comfortable skirting around personal issues again though highly vetted and looking at them from afar/analysing them rather than just “me”.
I don’t have an online outlet as such any more [recently even modified old blogposts] and due to recent events don’t trust people any more which is why I agree with you completely.
“is it that i can only trust people from a distance?”
That’s a very profound question, sulz, and one I’m struggling with also. I would never say half the stuff on my blog to people I really know, but I also feel RL people wouldn’t want to read it. I can be freer exactly because I’m not going to see them at work, or wherever. I have cut down on blogging since using Twitter too, but I wonder why? They are so different. I do miss that people don’t comment on my blog as much, because they’ve made the comment on Twitter instead. That’s fine, but I’d rather have the comments on the blog…hmmm maybe I’ll start pasting them there, and say “via twitter”.
Anyway, I follow your Twitter, so I still get to know the juicy stuff! 🙂
As much as I like receiving comments on my blog [which basically means people have read what I’ve got to say vs stats which could just be Google crawlers] I also feel they’re very pressuring. I feel I have to reply both because I’m the blog owner and because someone’s taken their time to read and comment. However, often I just don’t know what to say. I feel I’ve said it all in my post and there’s not much else left.
And I’m also greatful that many people, like myself, have moved away from commenting for commenting’s sake. I used to get a lot of comments from people that commented, because they would always comment on my posts without actually commenting on something specific. Again, I’m thankful for people to stop by and read and comment, but why do it if it’s just random?
Anyways, end rant!
I often reply on Twitter instead of commenting on blogs.
muse: i think tweeting and blogging are like two different sort of friends. they fulfill certain qualities you look for in an activity so when you feel the urge to express yourself you go to the ‘friend’ that is best suited for the kind of self-expression you want to do. before tweeting, blogging was the only outlet and so we did all our expressing here. now that we have more than one avenue we can choose which fits our self-expression better.
i get what you mean, cat. i find myself commenting less these days and am not so obliged to reply to strangers leaving comments in my blog, unlike before. but that said i still welcome them all.
An emotional mess, eh? Not as bad as me, I hope! I have a ferocious temper that’ll make a dinosaur look like a plush puppy, and I think you’ve seen glimpses of that (or read of them!) But it’s normal for humans to be emotional in the first place, it’s a part of what makes us different from any other species, it’s just that this “emotion” flows in different quantities, depending on the person; just the matter of which button gets pushed, really.
i think being an emotional mess is not nice when you have to witness it. in writing it does not seem so awful. if you do it in private with someone you trust, then that’s totally encouraged. in my case i find myself ‘losing it’ at work more than i would have liked it to happen.
I totally agree with what you’ve said, In fact, I blogged about this sometime back. it’s much more easier to write stuff on the blog, because none of my close friends are in there. Unlike Facebook. I do not Twitter at all.
I guess we all trust only from a distance. Else, it has to e those reeeely close people, with whom you can just say e.v.e.r.y.thing.
I have no solutions to offer. Only support 😉
i guess there really is no solution for a dilemma like this, until you find the right person or another avenue to express yourself. but meanwhile, thank you for reading and commenting. 🙂 i’m surprised by the reaction this post has received.
amen… i guess this is true for almost every blogger..
well, almost every other personal blogger. 😉 not many are quite as melodramatic as me in writing lol.