Originally published February 22, 2006
When I was a child, I spake as a child... only at the time I didn't use words like "spake." My vocabulary, like my life back then, was far simpler than it has become. What few words I knew, I used to tell the world honestly and incessantly who I was and what I thought. I was brutally, even painfully honest in a manner which children share only with parrots and the insane; I told anyone who would listen anything that came to mind and never stopped once to consider what was appropriate to the setting, how they might respond, or whether they cared. It was a lot like having Tourettes, but without the redeeming novelty of randomly blurted obscenities. Yes, just like Tourettes, only boring.
I shared my every waking thought with others because I did not know not to. They say that ignorance is bliss, but the reality is that ignorance is only blissful for a while, because at some point you will bring your ignorance of the reality that fire is hot into the presence of an actual fire, at which point ignorance becomes 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Likewise, your ignorance of the sexual history of your latest one-night stand may only be blissful until a few days later when you notice that it feels like you are urinating pure jalapeno juice. (If you're smart, later the same day you will lose your blissful ignorance of what a really big shot of penicillin feels like.)
And so it was inevitable that one day my belief that ignorance is bliss would run afoul of someone else's belief that silence is golden. I'm not certain which specific beating by which specific classmate at my elementary school alerted me to the possibility that there might be something valuable in keeping one or two thoughts to myself, but since I remember more than a few such beatings, I have to assume that it wasn't the first. Armed with such helpful input as my classmates were willing to offer, I learned over time to filter much of what went through my brain and to exert some control over which thoughts begat utterances. I also made very sure never to use words like "begat."
That doesn't mean I stopped thinking all the things I used to tell people, it just means I kept them to myself. Virtually everyone does this. It's a natural dichotomy of human existence that we simultaneously want people to know who we are while intentionally hiding information from them that is critical to an accurate understanding. (Another is that most people can yodel, but very few people will admit it.) Historically, some people have kept journals in order to record, apparently for themselves alone, the thoughts they've chosen not to share with the rest of us. It's almost as though the urge to reveal ourselves to others is so strong in some people that, having chosen to hide certain things from others, they decide to reveal it instead to themselves.
And then blogging came along and screwed the whole system up. Writing a blog feels exactly the same as writing in a journal. Of course, with a journal you'd have to invite complete strangers into your bedroom in order to share those thoughts with them, but with a blog you just post it and they will come. This means that more and more people are treating their innermost thoughts less and less as would adults and more and more like children. (Or parrots... or the insane...)
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but... no... that's exactly what I'm saying. If we stop hiding who we are from each other and start "letting it all hang out," even if only in a blog, the impact on society could be devastating. I mean, what if everyone started sharing their deepest fears, and found out that, yes, strange as it may seem, lots of other people piss themselves when confronted with balloon animals? What if the two lonely Creed fans in the world were to discover each other? What if Letterman were to read Oprah's blog and discover that once you get past the difference in their height, gender, skin color, background, interests, and entire outlook on life they are actually a lot alike?
Recognizing what parts of our psyche to share with others and which bits are best kept to ourselves is an art form humankind has developed and honed for millennia; like music, it has both its sounds and its silences. Blogging is karaoke for the mind, and it's every bit as vile and dangerous as the musical variety. We're meant to keep some of our shit to ourselves, people. God gave us lips so we could zip them, or in the alternative, so that other people could fatten them for us if we didn't.
The rules are simple folks: think what you want, but keep most of it to yourself, or at some point you're going to take a beating. (Trust me. I know of what I spake.)
