How Blogging Fits Into My Life

Blogging isn't something for the weak of heart.  I'm not talking about people who blog privately for their family and friends.  It's a fantastic way to keep people updated, but it's not quite the same thing as blogging publicly when your readers probably don't know you in real life.  It's not something that you can take on without being willing to put yourself out there.  I have strangers reading about some of the most personal things about me.  And they have the all powerful choice of commenting.  And they can say whatever they want about my very personal thoughts.  I've been very lucky that my readers have been kind to me in the comments thus far.  But that doesn't mean it will always be that way...

I've had a few discussions lately about blogging and how it fits into my life.  For me, this is a blog about my life as an adopted person.  The adopted part is what I write about most frequently, but that doesn't mean that I never blog about other things in my life.  Or the people in it.  That being said, I do my best to keep things private as much as I can. I'm somewhat anonymous here and I don't use real names.  Yes, I use nicknames but unless you know me in real life, you'd have no way of knowing who those people are.  It's just a lot easier to write "Rudy" than "my boyfriend" (and so on and so forth).

As in any adoption blog, I'm going to blog about my family.  My adoption is surrounded by family.  One family gave me away and another family took me in (in one manner of speaking).  So that means that my first parents are going to be a frequent topic, you know, because they are the ones who put me up for adoption.  Just like my adoptive parents are going to be frequent topics of discussion, you know, being the ones who took me in and all.  As for the rest of my family, yes, they are going to come up.  They play a part in my adoption story.  My sister is the one who gave me the information I needed to complete my search.  My aunts have been super supportive when I've needed to talk about my adoption issues.  My first uncle and I share a profession (how random is that?), which is probably going to come up.  Otherwise, what would I write about?

I'm not just about adoption.  I have other things going on with my life.  I have a boyfriend.  I have friends.  I have a job.  All of these things may or may not come up in my blog.  I'm human.  I'm a person.  I have a life.  That's the thing about adoption.  It's always there.  It's always present.  And adoptees have to live with that each and every single day.

Rudy knows that I blog here.  He picked his own nickname.  He sometimes reads here.  I have two friends that I gave this blog address too.  One from my hometown (the only one from my hometown with the URL other than me) and one from college.  That's it.  Three people from my "real" life.  I haven't passed out the URL because I don't like the idea of writing thinking that my entire family is reading over my shoulder.  I don't think I could be as personal.  It's too intense for me to think about that.  And honestly?  I don't think I could handle having such intense conversations about adoption with my adoptive family (or my first family for that matter).  They don't know how painful my adoption has been for me, and it would hurt them to find out.  So I keep my happy adoptee face on when I'm around them, and write about my pain here.

I've been debating going private lately.  I'm still debating, but I'm airing on the side of keeping this public after I read something on Facebook last week about not letting one person ruin your day if there are almost 7 billion other people out there.  I just don't want to deal with drama.  I'll probably keep it public.  We'll see.

Thanks for reading,