to ask these questions on a job application.

Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eightieth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness!

- Alasdair Gray, Lanark.

(via @abysmalmusings)

I think you all know my feelings on tweeting your pain: it’s not appropriate. It’s somewhat different if your Twitter persona is an extension of your blog, but generally I’m of the opinion that your suicidal ideation is TMI for Stephen Fry.

But just because you don’t say it doesn’t mean you aren’t feeling it.

So tell me the tweets you had to hold back, the tweets that were too truthful to be understood or forgiven, the tweets that lodged in your throat. Go on.

I hate to break it to you, but you’re a Jaffa Cake.

You behave like one thing, but you’re really something else.

Disclaimer: this post mentions other blogs, but is not directed at any blogger in particular.

A wise man, it might have been Confucius, once said

Don’t blog what you wouldn’t write in a newspaper.

But do any of us think of our blogs as little egocentric newspapers?

No, we argue, our blogs are not static pages or conduits for delivering information. We read as much as we write, if not more. We are interactive. We are a community.

Yet in the midst of all this pleasant chatter, we forget that there are other people listening. Some are benevolent lurkers – fine – and some of them have just stumbled in blindly searching for nun pr0n – also fine, they don’t hang around.

But over the past few weeks, an increasing number of you have found your blogs visited by your friends, enemies, family, fiancés, employers, and even psychiatrists. And, for almost everyone I think, it’s been nothing short of disastrous.

Yes, we put ourselves out there, online, we opened ourselves up for the whole world to see. But, but, but they weren’t meant to be looking!

Most of us blog behind nicknames. We didn’t expect to be found out and, when we were, we felt intruded upon. We felt wigged-out.

By omission, we thought they were excluded. But we were wrong.

What’s worse, is how we were looked upon: it couldn’t be much lower.

We’re losers, you and I, and we’ll never get anywhere. We’ve got a victim mentality and we won’t help ourselves. You call it writing, but they call it wallowing. And when you thought you were leaving supportive comments, dear reader, you were actually enabling this pity-party.

So, you see, it’s them versus us.

You may have noticed that my recent posts have only been viewable with a password. I am considering moving my blog to another address and making it private from the outset. A blog for us, just for us, and not them.

When I began this blog, I was blogging in the dark, with nothing to lose. Now my life is opening up – just a crack, but I am hopeful for more. The two lives, the two selves, ebb and flow into each other. But one is accepted, and the other is not.

I am easily tracked online. I just assumed no-one would put themselves to the bother of trying. But what if they do? What if they already have?

Benevolent lurkers, this is your time to speak up.