If I Were an Anonymous Blogger

If I were an anonymous blogger, I'd blog (uninhibited) about my odd health problems, my imperfect children, my sense of style (Do I have one? Can I call it frumpy?), my worries and triumphs, my weight, my children's not-so-perfect hygiene habits, my insecurities, my failures in the kitchen. Anonymity makes the internet amazing -- and chilling. I would never talk about these kinds of personal things on Facebook. Facebook is false and frighteningly un-anonymous. People say things they would never say aloud. In public. They let it all hang out. 

But they are in public. Whether they like it or not. Anonymity doesn't really exist.

You can't be incognito on the internet. Type it. It's published. Forever. Even if you try to take it down or try to recall that insidious email you truly regret sending. Cached and saved and passed around, our faux pas will never go away. 

I wonder about the social health of today's children who are growing up on Facebook. 

I found it rather intriguing to "find" old friends and reconnect on FB. But if I had always kept in touch -- in that intimate fakey facebooky way -- with my childhood and adolescent friends, would I have ever grown up? 

Maybe my world would not be what it is today. Maybe I would still be the girl who graduated high school in 1988 with a Presidential Scholarship to BYU thinking that she had life all figured out, the girl who had trouble setting goals for Personal Progress because she couldn't think of anything to work on! (After all, she was close to perfect.) The girl who thought she was rather grown up when she got married a year later.

If Facebook had existed in 1988, maybe I would not have married at 18, had 5 children every 2 years starting at 19, moved 17 times, started home schooling, met all the fabulous people in all the fabulous places I've lived, felt so grateful (a couple days ago) to have spent 5 Christmases in a row in the same house(!), grown a healthy distance apart from the high school mentality, grown up at all. Maybe I wouldn't have taken up the viola again after all those babies -- maybe I wouldn't have quit playing it in the first place. But all these experiences and choices have shaped who I am, how I perceive the world, how I make decisions, what I think about, and where I like to go for dinner out -- when we get to go! 

If Facebook had existed in 1988, maybe I would not have gained so much from solitude (believe me, there is solitude -- or at least loneliness -- in raising 5 small children); but, then again, maybe I would not have given so little to those around me. Maybe I would have been less inside myself -- maybe I would have been a better neighbor, a better friend. 

I wish I could write about all these things anonymously. Bare my soul. Help someone along the way -- or at least give them an Erma Bombeck laugh or two. 

Or maybe I can be me without anonymity. Both my adoring readers would figure me out eventually, even if I wrote anonymously.