Insecurities About Sharing My Life on Social Media

Editing Note: The title of this post was spell checked incorrectly. One March 16, 2022, I changed it back to it’s original title and spelling. I’m so sorry about any confusion this has caused anyone!

For many years, I’ve struggled with the kind of posts I make on social media. It doesn’t matter how informational and well written the posts it, there will always be a time when I look at it and feel frustrated and embarrassed by it. It’s not because I don’t put effort into my posts or don’t think very hard about the posts I make online. It’s because I feel like I’m not going a good job showing my life the way I would like to.

When I started taking social media and blogging seriously, I made the decision to not share certain parts of my life. These parts of my life are things I. still to this day, have not talked about. They include my work (Sometimes referred to as my “day job”), certain parts of my family life (Such as I never talk about my relative’s names, how I am related to certain relatives, or where they live), and my love life. I know that one day I will feel comfortable talking about these parts of my life, but there are major lines I will never cross.

Today, I have a way of talking about what’s going on in my life without needing to use words or phrases that I would to one of my friends or someone I talk to in person. I don’t mind it, but when I started my first blog, Essie of Who, over ten years ago, I received many comments about how I’m starting a blog in order to talk about people behind their backs. I’m still not sure how they believed my sewing, photography, and all around art blog was actually a gossip blog about the people I knew back then, but they did. To this day their comments still hurt me and make me seriously second guess how I talk about people online.

I don’t want to stop second guessing what I want to talk about other people online. I have a philosophy that it is my blogs and if I don’t want to talk about something someone did to me, then I won’t. After all, I’m the one that must answer for what I write online. The problem is I wonder if I’m allowing these second guesses of how I talk about people make me want to ignore what I want to put online in order to protect those around me.

Since I started Essie of Who in 2011, I let the friendships and connections I had with anyone critical of my blog go. Slowly, these friendships did die and I don’t miss them at all. I love my group of friends and the only complaint I have about them is I wish I lived closer to them and got to see them more often. Despite this, I still enjoy what precious little time I get to spend with them and they make as much effort to make our time together count. They also encourage me to keep blogging about whatever I want to and not mention what I don’t want to.

Life can look so perfect online. That’s the lure of it. I know it was for me when I took social media seriously. I wanted to give a greatest hits version of my artistic endeavors in hopes someone would see my work and want me to work on a project. This happened with various degrees of success, but I began to enjoy talking about anything and everything I wanted to more than make it an always ready-to-be-submitted artistic portfolio.

It’s hard to pick and choose what you want to talk about online. Sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes it’s not. When I started this blog, it was out of a need for me to talk more about myself and other interests and hobbies for fun on social media than about art in order to get a job. This helped me feel better about myself and how I look at myself as well.

Even though I have no idea what I’ll talk about next on social media, I love writing blog post. I want to create more YouTube videos. But there is one thing I really do need to stop doing: I need to stop believing I am a traitor to my friends. True, I mention them on social media. That does not mean that I will talk about anything embarrassing or hurtful online. They are my friends. I don’t want to hurt them. They also know that. They also know that I am guarded about certain parts of my life because of privacy concerns. Even though I’m not as revealing as other bloggers and people on social media, they don’t want me to be. They want me to choose what parts about my life I want to share and which ones I don’t.

No, I don’t show as much of my life online in the way I want to. Yet, I share enough for me to feel comfortable about what I post and share. I didn’t join social media to be someone who enjoys embarrassing my friends. I did it to share hobbies and other parts of myself. So far it’s served me well and I’m sure it will serve me well in the future.

Well, that’s all for now! Thank you for reading!