Getting personal for a moment

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 31st July, 2005 @ 02:42

I was reading an entry on my boss' blog the other day and it set me thinking about how I intend to use this site to discuss what's happening with me.

So far, my posts have been 90% geek related, as that stuff is a big part of my life, let alone my career. But I would actually like to post stuff about more personal matters from time to time, and there's a number of reasons why.

Primarily there's a selfish motivation. It's useful to me in two ways. It gets my thoughts out of my head and onto the screen, and that can be surprisingly useful in itself. It also creates a permanent record of those thoughts that I think will be interesting for me to look back at in a couple of years time and reflect how I've changed.

I've had a glimmer of that recently, through both finding my old sites on archive.org and also reading the odd email from between 2 and 4 years ago. And I've found it incredibly interesting to see how my language, thoughts and feelings have changed in that short time.

So, why not just keep a private journal? Well, there's two parts to that. There's a good chance that eventually a little digital decay would set in, I'd lose interest in keeping it up, and the data would eventually disappear. Archive.org has already provided me with a look back that I'd not have been able to do otherwise. And that needs me to keep this stuff public.

And next up, I think it gives anyone reading this some insight into who I am, more so than my geeky ramblings about some new technology do. If you don't really care about who I am, that's fine too, I hope you find some useful product of my brain here.

But if you do have some tiny interest in knowing me, then what better way than following a few of the ups and downs of my life? Seeing how I react to the stuff that I have to deal with can probably give you way more insight into me than actually having a brief conversation could.

I'm often rubbish at opening up my true feelings to people, as my former partners will testify. So maybe this will help me do that. Who knows?

I'm not quite sure what this will become, whether I'll ever post my deepest, darkest thoughts on here. But I can say that I'm at least open to the possibility of doing so.

My job at the moment is all about community regeneration and getting people in touch with their neighbours. And in some small way this site feels like a way I can personally do that. Maybe not with my physical neighbours, but with the people who know me already to varying degrees, and to my virtual neighbours who might stumble across the site.

Maybe it's a tacky clich?, but wouldn't the world be a better place if we all understood each other a little better? It's easy to fear difference, but the fear stems from ignorance. If you know who I truly am beyond the labels of white, twenty something British gay geek, then what's there to be afraid of?

Or maybe I should just stop posting late at night!