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,

Oh Social Technology

I have a twitter.  If you didn't know that, you can follow me @IBMTitleHere.  Shameless plug I know...  Anyway, I also have a personal twitter.  So I have two twitter accounts and I tweet different things from each one.  I'll admit that I'm awful at tweeting.  Horrible.  But I give it a try.  And sometimes other people post some amazing stuff on Twitter and I read articles and stories that I never would have found otherwise.

Facebook on the other hand... Before I just had my one and only Facebook account.  So you guessed it.  My name is on there, plus lots of personal information.  I have my visibility limited, but there's enough on there that I'm not anonymous.  I blog anonymously.  I use my first name, but I don't use my last name on here.  In theory you should not be able to figure out who I am.  My reason for this?  I talk about other people on this blog.  I talk about my first family, and I talk about my adoptive family.  So for their privacy, I'm not public about this blog.  But lots of sites now need you to log in via Facebook and I wasn't able to participate in that before.  So I finally created a new Facebook account.

I'm jumping into the whole social media thing the way I didn't before.  It should be interesting.  It's a lot of work.  I have to migrate what I did have about adoption (and heavily protected) over to my new adoption Facebook page.  And if I like up here, I still have to be careful about what I post there so that I don't accidentally out anyone.  So much stress.  But all worth it to be able to log in to these websites and comment and all that fun stuff without giving away my name.

Also, I really need to get that adoption stuff off my personal Facebook account.  I've had a few comments made in passing, and honestly?  I just don't want to deal with it.  It's not worth it.  Besides, I've been dealing with dual personalities and dual identities since I was a baby.  I'm a pro at this!  Hehe!

I Love The Internet

The Internet lets me share things
like this

What would be do with the Internet?  Seriously!  A random statement, I know, but I swear I have a point here.  Music has always been a huge part of my life.  It's something that has gotten me through a lot, and will help me get through the challenges that I've been facing lately.  When I say music has been a huge part of my life, I should clarify.  I've been dancing since I was two.  At the time of writing this post, I'm twenty-four... (wow, just got distracted by the fact I'm an adult!).  I've been dancing for twenty-two years.  That's almost 92% of my life.  If I was still in school, I'd know that's an A-, a pretty big deal.  Without music, I couldn't dance (and trip over my own feet).  So it's been super important.

Before the Internet, I would listen to tapes and CDs.  My parents were really into tapes, so I used to have a tape player.  Then when CD players became popular, I asked for CDs but my parents didn't really trust them.  And they were expensive!  So most of the time, I was limited to radio.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the radio.  It's fantastic.  I have my favorite stations.  But sometimes you just want to hear that ONE song that you know is going to turn your day around.  Before I had nothing.

Now, I have YouTube!  I want to hear Brown Eyed Girl and I don't have my iPod, I just plug it into YouTube and I can hear several different versions (which I don't really care about because we all know the original is the best).  And I'm instantly in a good mood.

But sometimes I'm not in the mood to just hear a specific song.  And while I now have all my music on my magical cell phone, sometimes I just want to hear something different.  So I recently jumped on the Pandora Radio bandwagon.  I went there.  It's amazing!  I love how it seems to read my mind and send me songs that I've never heard before but LOVE all while mixing in some old favorites and current hits.  Plus I'm one of those weird people who use too much data for the smaller data plan but comes no where close to the limit of data I pay for.  So I love listening to my Pandora Radio to up my data out of principle.  Yeah, I'm odd like that.

I have a few other Internet loves.  I recently was invited to Pinterest and I'm obsessed!  I'm totally loving it and it's a new distraction when I don't have anything going on and need to relax.  I have a board that's filled with beach pictures, and it's my new relaxing board for when I need to take a chill pill.  I love it!  I'm also actually liking the new Twitter (didn't think I would at first), and I switched to Timeline on Facebook the minute I could so I'm not phased by it.

And my number one reason to be thankful for the Internet?  My Internet peeps!  Between blogging, my support forum, my new friends on Facebook, and all that other goodness, I've found a way to connect to so many people who are going through similar things.  There's nothing sweeter...

Adoptive Family Tree

Emotionally I'm pretty washed out.  So I'm writing about something that's completely different today.  My adoptive family tree.

I don't consider it to be my family tree.  In fact, if I haven't met people on the tree, then I don't consider them to be family.  At all..  I never have, and I never will.  Even before I starting dealing with adoption issues, I've never felt connected to them.  Those people are in my parents' pasts, but not mine.  It's interesting for them, but I just find it to be a good story.

When I did my own family tree on Ancestry.com, I felt bad about leaving them out.  Classic adoptee guilt!  Nobody said anything to me, I just internalized it.  So I made one for each of my parents.  Yes, I own four trees on that website.  One's mine, one's Rudy's, one's my mom's, and one's my dad's.  For my adoptive parents, I put in what I knew and worked from there.  I didn't combine them because they don't have biological children to pass that tree onto.  But I figured I could always give it to my cousins and they'd have their tree or at least half of it should they want it.  I digress.

A few weeks ago I got an email that someone private messaged me on Ancestry.com.  Ok, I thought.  It was in regards to my a-dad's family tree.  Which is public.  Turns out this woman had a question about my great-grandmother.  My great-grandmother was a peach.  Not really.  Somehow she grew up with an aunt and uncle.  Nobody knows why that is.  She refused to tell anyone.  Nobody knew anything about her past and if they did, they aren't alive anymore.  All we knew was that she ran off with the butcher boy so her aunt and uncle wouldn't send her to finishing school, had four kids, her only baby girl died, and her husband left her.  She sent her boys off to work at a farm (my grandfather was three at the time) and eventually married the milk man.  I kid you not.  I recently learned that her uncle sent her an allowance every month of $40, which was a lot of money back then.

This person on Ancestry.com was confused because the records show her born to one family, but raised in another.  Sounds an awful lot like adoption to me just without the name change.  In fact, this person would have gotten it completely wrong had my great-grandmother's last name been changed on the records, which would have happened if she was formally adopted.  Go figure.

So I private messaged the lady back and explained that yes, she had the right person and how all those people were connected.  Never heard back.  Rude.

So now that I was back on Ancestry.com after a short break (even though I still pay for it every month), I noticed my mom's family tree had a lot of hints.  So I followed them.  And then holy crap I made a discovery, or what felt like one.  My mom has a very German maiden name.  She's mostly Irish, but the last name is German.  Turns out the name doesn't come from Germany but from Switzerland!  I called my grandfather for confirmation and turns out he knew about it all along.  I guess they just never talked about it.  My dad knew (so my mom knew too) but the younger children in the family didn't.  Because the name is famously German, nobody questioned it.  So naturally I put it up on Facebook and invited everyone to view the tree.  Because a lot of my cousins are about to get to that point where they need it for school.  I'm nothing if not helpful.

No comments thus far on the fact that I didn't list my sister and myself on the tree.  We don't belong there.  I have my own.  But it's not something that we discuss as a family.  So I'm surprised that nobody chose to comment.  I'm also pretty sure some of my cousins have no clue my sister and I are adopted.  So I could see them scratching their heads.

It's a fun hobby.  And I have a few more hints, and I was recently emailed about for Rudy's family tree.  So I have some more fun research ahead of me.  I love this stuff!

Twitter

I've finally jumped onto the bandwagon and got a twitter account.  I do have a personal twitter, but I've learned my lesson with Facebook (remember the whole Mentor Confrontation?).  I now have a separate Adoption Related Twitter Account!  That just seemed like it needed to be in Title Case.

You can follow me on Twitter @ibmtitlehere (insertbadmovietitlehere was too long).  I don't use my personal Twitter very often either, so I'm going to try to get better about it.  I'm planning on getting a new phone soon (i.Phone perhaps?) so that might make it easier.  I don't always get the point of it, but I do find it rather interesting.  Some of the posts are really cute and funny, while others get me great information.  Plus it's great when I'm bored :-)

I started this twitter a few days ago and I've been playing around with it.  I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be a complete flop before I posted about it lol!  So I actually have a few things up there.  I'm going to keep it going.  That's my new mantra anyway!

So if you're on Twitter and you want to follow me, I'll follow you back!