I just finished a pleasurable hour rooting around in Diane Patterson's triff page on journal writing. I do love lists and archives and useful collections like this. I especially like her page on why web journals suck. Since I was in an exploratory mood, I also pottered around on the Open Pages list, looking at the latest journals. I have been feeling as though I'm not open enough in my journal, not self-revelatory enough, and wondering if this is cowardice or common sense. I've decided; it's common sense. I just don't think it's necessary to share quite as much as some people are doing, whew. That is, it's fine for other people. It wouldn't suit me.
I don't forbid anyone to read my journal, although my husband rarely reads it, and I don't think anyone in my family has a computer besides my sister at work so they're probably not reading it. They could if they wanted to. I simply can't imagine publishing my writing on a public medium like the web and then insisting no one I know read it. This strikes me as being unclear on the concept, especially if one uses one's real name. I think you have a couple of choices in self-publishing like this. Either choose to edit out real names and/or identifying personal information on those you write about, or don't write about them at all, if you're squeamish about being discovered. Alternately, you can write and be damned to whoever reads it. One way or another, it's still publishing in a public forum and therefore the audience is out of your control.
Thinking about who might be reading my diary got me to thinking about whether anyone from my dimly remembered past as a suburban teenager might be online. I made some fruitless enquiries on Alta Vista and didn't find any name matches to old high school friends. On a whim, I looked up the high school itself. No dice. Then I just typed in the name of the island, and voila, a page full of information on Mercer Island. I felt slightly dizzy and weird while reading over it. Seeing those street names again was odd, setting off subtle little memory bombs. It was sort of horrible to think about it all again. I wasn't very happy there although I did have friends and a pretty normal life. Suffice to say I don't think I'll look at that info again for a long time. If anyone from Mercer Island ever finds me, they can read the diary, though. Maybe they'll learn more about the real me than I was ever willing to disclose as a teenager, even if what I write now isn't terribly confessional.
Coda: the fireflies returned to Tennessee tonight. They're dancing on the lawn right now, soaring and twinkling in silent beauty.
