The inconvenient truth(s) of being a writer

I'm back from my long hiatus from blogging.  I haven't gotten to it despite winter break having begun for a while now.  I took a little trifling vacation and did some soul-searching.  In that soul-searching, I came up with quite the variety of blogpost topics.  However, I now refrain from blogging about any of those (that is, out of the ones that I can actually remember).

I refrain from writing a lot of the time.  I feel like being a writer (or in my case, writer-in-training/writer-wannabe) means handling something very delicate - like if you aren't tip-toeing painstakingly enough, something will snap, whether that be a personal relationship or...even a career (your boss may find your post disturbing - gasp!).

Like today, I wanted to blog about how my mother thinks I may be incapable of finding a boyfriend.  But as I started to type...actually, no, scratch that - I never started to type.  It was too much of a hot topic to get started on.  Sometimes what I brainstorm becomes too personal, too brash, or even too uncensored.  Sometimes potentially intense and colorful ideas get shoved aside because I fear that they may be too much for the general audience to handle (not that I have much of an audience). And because you never know who is reading, you try (or at least, I try) to not offend any individual who just might be offended.  For example, my parents. I don't hide my blog from them; I don't think it does them justice for a daughter who they have been raising to hide her blog from them, or any other piece of writing for that matter.  But sometimes their reactions really irk me.  They think there are certain thoughts that I shouldn't have written about, things that I shouldn't be sharing with the open cyberspace.  I, on the other hand, do not think I've blogged about anything even near risque.  No one has ever told me that I have either.  Moral of this very-short-story:  a writer can never know what disturbs some people.  People's judgments are too diverse.

This is a problem.  A notably troublesome problem, in my opinion.  Based on me (note that I am not covering every writer out there, just some), I know that writers can be very expressive individuals.  I mean, hell, I'll be one of the most open people you will ever meet.  I don't hide things - not because I don't like to hide things, but because I don't even think about what to hide so everyone just basically knows everything about me.  I have no secrets.  Pretty much all elements of my life are...well, shared.  Does this miff people?  Sure it does.  But am I supposed to care about ruffling people's nerves so much to the point of holding myself back?  Movies like Julie and Julia are what worry me - the main character, Julie, was afraid that her idol, Julia Child, didn't appreciate her - possibly because she mentioned the word, "fuck," too many times in her blog.  I mean, my everyday choice of vocabulary does not include words such as, "fuck," but the situation is relevant.

Also, speaking of expressive, I am often excessively expressive on the internet.  When I tweet or IM, I tend to use lots of punctuation marks and varied lower-/uppercase letters.  It doesn't even matter that it's a subconscious habit because I will often communicate the wrong message.  For instance, I was chatting with one of my best friends on IM today.  He thought that I was getting angry at him because I commenced my usage of uppercase letters and "?!" marks.  I had no intention of getting mad at him whatsoever! (See?  There goes that exclamation mark.)

I'm sure virtually all writers know about this risk - that the intended audience can often be very different from the actual audience, and thus, messages have the potential to be altered in the most unintended and unnerving manners.  And I'm sure I'm just too inexperienced to have honed my skill of filtering my writing.  And, I'm sure that there are plenty of writers out there who really don't care what their audience may think of them.  I'm also quite sure, however, that there are those who are very much like me - those who care about what others may think or how they may react.  What do you do then?  There's just so many perils to being a writer.  Who would want to spend his or her life being one?  Pfft...evidently, me.