simont | (no subject)

At the Gallery yesterday, hilarityallen complained that I hadn't written much in this diary recently. So I had a think about why I hadn't, and noticed a sort of a recurring theme, which is that I'm cautious about people asking me about it.

It used to be reasonably common that I'd write really cryptic things in my (then solely Monochrome-based) diary. Sometimes these were in plain but uninformative English (‘That was somewhat unexpected, but undeniably pleasant. I wonder if it will have any future effects?’ might be a typical example), and sometimes they took the slightly more artistic form of opaque dialogues between fictitious supernatural beings which were a complex metaphor for bits of my psyche, but usually they meant a lot more to me than most of the people reading them, and were there more for the therapeutic effect of writing them than for the enlightenment of the readers.

Then again, some years ago I went through a period of paranoia and panic attacks, and would react very badly if particular people wrote anything at all in their diaries that made me think they knew something I didn't. And since then I've always felt slightly guilty about doing this sort of cryptic thing, because it doesn't seem quite fair to hint to lots of people that there are things they don't know and that you're not going to tell them!

Perhaps it's also because the people I know now are more direct and curious about things. A few years ago, if I'd written a diary entry suggesting there was some gossip, people would have taken the implied hint that if I hadn't given details then it was because I didn't intend to; of course they might still feel it was worth asking me in private in case I was prepared to tell them something I wouldn't have told my whole potential readership, but in practice people didn't seem to do this very often, and when they did it tended to be justified. These days, on the rare occasions I've posted something that piques someone's curiosity, I tend to get too many questions about it, some of them in public LiveJournal comments (meaning that anyone who could see the original entry could see my answer if I gave one, which was surely the whole point of me not giving details there in the first place?).

The result of this is that I tend to not even bother hinting any more, because it's more trouble than it's worth; which means the people who pry have actually been counterproductive and caused my net information output to drop. Accordingly, when the most interesting thing that happened to me in a given week is of this type, I will just shut up for the whole week and then people complain at me for not writing stuff…

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This looks like a case of `you can't benefit all of the people all of the time', particularly since the set of people who'd moan about you not making entries and the set who ask awkward questions have probably only a small overlap (although, given human nature, they probably aren't disjoint).

A solution might be to make cryptic-style entries no-comments?

Well, like [Unknown site tag] said you can turn comments off, or you can do what I do and use friends-only posts for stuff you wouldn't want the whole universe reading, or you can just use the diplomat's option and reply by email to awkward questions people ask in public comments. Or ignore them altogether, of course. The Internet is hugely flexible, use it as a set of media over any of which a conversation can be continued. You don't have to have all of a conversation about an lj entry in public lj comments, just as you don't have to hold all of a conversation you have face-to-face at the same volume or within earshot of your other friends. Or even at the same time or in the same place, come to that.

You seem to ahve this problem with asserting your right to only tell people as much of the facts as *you* want to tell them, instead of believing that once they've got one bit of information they then have a right to know the rest as well :) Just because people are naturally nosey doesn't mean you're obliged to satisfy that.

I wasn't so much complaining as enquiring. I didn't mean to provoke whole debate on the subject. Consider me cowering abjectly in a corner somewhere.