16 January 2005

Question #1 answered :)

As promised... questions get answered. Want me to answer one (anything-- I'm an open book!), just ask it and leave a way for me to contact you once it's up...

The first question comes from one of my fellow Cogsters, H. (aka "flyingblogspot")...

First question: Looking back through the past few months in your LJ, there are very few locked entries (or at least, few that are locked with a filter that allows me to see them). So my question is - what sort of content will cause measi to lock a journal entry?

I honestly resist locking entries as much as possible. One of the reasons I started writing in an online journal to begin with was to force myself to open myself up. Pre-Erich (and honestly probably about six or seven months into dating Erich), I was not someone who felt comfortable opening up my thoughts to other people for fear of being belittled. Very few people knew me at all-- including my parents. I tended to be the silent one in the corner and also the girl in high school who was elbowed into lockers... a lot... for being the too-smart-so-we-hate-her student. Add some dosage of my home life as a kid, and you have serious contents under pressure.

So as much as I've been tempted with several entries, I resist the urge to lock as much as I possibly can. If it's something I absolutely don't want on the web, it simply doesn't get posted to my online journal. It might be written or typed somewhere on my hard drive. But it won't go online. No online entry is completely safe or locked away.

In the last four years at Diary-X, I probably have about a dozen entries total that are locked. And over at LJ, I think I've filtered maybe ONE to friends-only (never anything completely private).
However, the things that have made me lock an entry include...

1) An argument between Erich and I or Jason and I that is unresolved or one that I'm not comfortable spreading widely on the net.

2) Entries regarding abortion because there was a good risk of my parents reading them at the time. (They'll be unlocked when I finish transferring entries to measi (dot) net). These were locked after the fact when I was having a bout of paranoia and a strong need to not have to go into that bombshell with my parents.

3) Disagreement with the management at Diary-X, when the post was typed AT Diary-X.

4) A very long letter to my dad after the hell that was Christmas 2002.

5) Entries regarding my intimate feelings about sex. Specifically when I'm trying to work through something I'm not comfortable discussing, but want to work through.

6) Overblown paranoia about something stupid.

7) An entry bitching about someone in my offline life that KNOWS I have the journal and might very well read it. Usually they're blowing off steam type entries, but they have the potential to be very ugly catalysts for melodrama.

:)

Keep the questions coming, guys!


No comments: