How Personal Should I Get on a Professional Blog?
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
I question I’ve vacillated on since I first started creating online content was how much of myself—my personal self—to put out there for public consumption. Like many people, I glommed onto social media when it became a thing and invariably overshared, only to recoil from it when it became apparent how toxic it was. These days I’m only on social media for professional purposes, and only on LinkedIn. That may change, but not yet.
My earliest attempts at blogging were strictly professional in nature. I began blogging as a PR diploma student at MacEwan University, and my blog at the time largely served as an outlet for what I was learning in the program. Later on, when I migrated to Medium, I started getting more essayistic and more personal. I felt reasonably safe doing so because my Medium content was behind a paywall, and I could carefully pick and choose who I wanted to give access to my private writings. I was also going through a lot at the time and felt like I needed this.
Eventually, however, I ended up pulling some of my most personal writings off Medium. I did this in part because circumstances in my life changed and I no longer felt these writing reflected my opinions and my reality. Beyond this, however, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more protective of my privacy and less inclined to share intimate details of my life online. For one thing, I just don’t find my own life that interesting. And for another, I’ve been burned in the past from oversharing, like many of us have, and am determined not to make that mistake again.
As I continue to produce these weekly blog posts, it’s important for me to keep in mind and respect my own boundaries when it comes to sharing personal information. Of course, this blog is intended as a professional resource as opposed to an online journal, meaning that excessive sharing of this kind would be out of place and just weird. That said, I do think I need to share some of myself in my writings here as they make the advice I give and anecdotes I relate much more relatable.
In my March 15 post, I discussed my struggles with procrastination. This didn’t strike me as a risky share, as just about everyone I know struggles with procrastination to one degree or another. On May 14, I talked about my love of running—within the context of my writing work. Again, not a risky share. Running is just about universally considered to be good for you and is about as non-controversial a subject matter as you can think of. And it’s not like I used the post to brag about my marathon finishing times. After all, this was a post about writing and how running has positively impacted my work.
Where I’ve gotten most personal on this blog so far was in my post on freelancing on top of a day job. In it, I not only shared details about my work routine but also discussed some of the personal struggles I’ve experienced in the work world as well as my ADHD diagnosis. This is a diagnosis that I’m quite open about and have shared with employers, colleagues, and friends alike. I share it because a) I believe it’s important to break the stigma around these things, and b) it directly relates to my interpersonal relationships and, especially, to the work I do.
My ADHD has been both a blessing and a curse for me professionally. On one hand, the hyperfocus that comes with the condition has contributed to my considerable writing output over the past nearly two decades and has helped make me very fast and very good. On the other hand, it made my attention span absolutely awful for anything that didn’t immediately capture my interest. I make no bones about the fact that I’ve been let go from more than one job for reasons related to my ADHD and that my job performance has improved considerably since going on medication.
Why do I share this but not other intimate details about my life? I do it because I think it’s highly relevant to my target audience, which consists largely of other professionals in the writing/communications sphere. ADHD is a very common condition that is still underdiagnosed in adults (and particularly among women) and one that can cause all sorts of problems in the work world. The fact that my diagnosis coincided with a virtual 180-degree turn in my professional life potentially (hopefully) has ramifications for a lot of other people out there. I’m nothing special; I just got diagnosed.
That’s probably as far into my own muck as I’ll be going in public, at least on this blog. I keep a personal journal where I dive deep into all the heavy stuff of life, and for the time being at least I’m happy to keep it there. As a writer, I think it’s important to have room in your life for writings that are for you and you alone. My daily journalling is a reason why I’m as skilled a writer as I am today; I’ve been doing it virtually every day for as long as I can remember. It’s also important for me on a psychological and spiritual level to have a sacred writing space that it off limits to everyone who’s not me.
I greatly admire those people who write publicly about their personal mental health travails and their journeys through grief and other challenging emotional terrains. Perhaps someday that will be me. I just don’t think it’ll be on this particular platform. This is a blog about the writing craft and the world of communications, just as the website it’s part of represents my professional footprint online. I would be undermining my own purposes here if I were to delve into personal problems not directly related to my work in this space. That and there are things I’m just not ready to share yet.
I may yet, but if and when I do it’ll be in an essayistic context in a publication dedicated to writings of this kind. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to continue writing about AI, hyphenation, Oxford commas, cover letter tips, and so on. Despite what I said a couple of weeks ago, it is important to me to know what I’m talking about when I’m writing, and these are the things on which I have sufficient expertise to discuss here. I’m still a beginner when it comes to plumbing the depths of my own soul. Maybe when I’m eighty or so I’ll be ready to write about that stuff.
