May 02 2008
“Do you worry about your ‘online presence’?”
Yeah.
The way I look at it, I have three options:
1. Be a silent nonentity, which is really not great for self-promotional purposes.
2. Pretend to be whatever I think will make the best impression on the greatest number of people, which is also not great because I’m not much of an actress and will eventually fall out of character, at which time I will be vilified as a liar and a fake who perpetrated a deception against the world.
3. Be myself and make use of my internal editor. I’m better about that last part elsewhere—it rarely takes me less than half an hour to compose a comment on someone else’s blog, even if it’s only a couple of sentences, and I delete half of them without submitting when, upon reflection, what I had to say seems unnecessary or irrelevant or needlessly confrontational or excessively stupid.
(Actually, WordPress has numbered this post 285 while indicating I have only 144 posts appearing on this blog, so I obviously do a fair amount of tongue-biting here, as well. As silly and juvenile as you’ve seen me get, just imagine the delights I’ve seen fit to censor…)
I do try to be thoughtful about what I’m saying, but having witnessed how often words are taken out of context, twisted, and blown out of proportion to suit the agenda of the blower, I think it’s naive for anyone not to expect to end up on somebody’s Bitch List sooner or later. Sure, I want to be universally liked, but that isn’t going to happen, for me or anyone else. Even Oprah isn’t liked by everybody.
So I’ll continue to worry and use that worry to restrain as many ill-conceived impulses as possible but, at the same time, not let it choke the life out of me because I realize it’s impossible to please everyone.
I survived high school with this philosophy. Since the interwebs seem to operate by the same rules, I should make it out of here alive, as well…
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