Lunch blog
Jill writes about what to blog and not to blog - or how you might use the blog to express personal emotions, albeit in an indirect way. Or how it is difficult to say something with the voice of your blog when your own voice suddenly sounds completely different.

I want to blog that it is exactly one year since this happened in my life. That is indeed a very personal thing, yet this event made it into my blog because I found it would have an impact on my life on all levels of it, professional as well as private. Since this painful experience was going to affect what I would be writing in the blog and how I would be performing as an academic for a significant amount of time to follow, it seemed naturally to at least "drop a hint" on what had happened.

During the past year, I have occasionally talked to colleagues (primarily male) who indicate that they read my blog and enjoy the academic bits, but they find there is a bit too much "personal stuff" in it to make it really cool or linkable all the right places etc. They never say it directly, but it is pretty obvious that they find the fact that I "express myself" emotionally a bit embarassing and profoundly uncool.

Experiences like this and the sense that perhaps sometimes I have "said too much" (even if I have erased it later), combined with the fact that I know students and future employers might be reading the blog, have made me think a lot about to what degree I would let my "private" voice mingle with the more professional one in this space. Eventually, I think I have come up with a compromise: I will write less about "personal stuff", but still let people know about significant events in my "private sphere" which might affect my academic life as well. Say (and this is just in theory!) that I was pregnant or going to get married or won the lottery; I sense it would be quite acceptable to blog this, much in the same way this would be the kind of change of the state of affairs, you would announce to your colleagues during lunch. However, death or break-ups and all the other negative aspects of life which hit you like a fist in the belly of your very being, they are somehow not as "bloggable", nor as suitable as safe discussion topics. Grief and anger are emotions much more difficult to deal with in Real Life than happiness and success, and it is no wonder that the expression of them might unsettle the voice of a blog as well. Yet, I find it is important to let students and colleagues know that I am not just a brain with clever thoughts, but a person who sometimes go to work having a really off-day because I am busy coming to terms with feelings and events happening in other parts of my life. Whereas it is difficult to announce one's state of mind on a post-it on the door, a blog is exactly, imho, a place where you can do that for those to read, who already care in the first place.

In the end, it all boils down to this: this is not always only an academic blog, but a blog about the life of an academic. Obviously, research topics are meant to take up most of the time and space here, but life itself will not go completely untold, just because it might be disadvantageous to my academic career, if I admit that I have one (a life, that is!).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:36