Thought provoking

I was reading a post over at Robert Scoble’s blog today about what he’s been doing, the things he’s learning about himself and how his blogging fits into his life. It’s all very interesting. As you know, I have two blogs, so these questions about how they fit into my life, and what part of me they represent are interesting to me.

I’ve tried to keep the two separate. I wanted the tech blog to be mostly about technology, about my work, with a little bit of my life to give it some personality. Meanwhile I’ve tried to make this one very personal, to give you a glimpse into my introspective life. A place to share my thoughts, my struggles, etc. I try to stay focused on the core reasons I started each blog, as they are what truly differentiates them. The tech blog is all about sharing information, creating a community of tech enthusiasts to share knowledge, tips and ideas with each other. I try to further that goal with each post over there, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but that’s what I’m trying to do. The goals here, however are a little more convoluted. I’m trying, as I have for all the years I’ve been doing a Child Abuse site, to help survivors feel less alone. How do you communicate that in a journal form though?

I mean, I can sit and say that I was abused as a child, I was beaten and molested, and that would accomplish what I set out to do, show survivors that they are not alone in their struggles. But once I’ve stated that, where do I go? I try to talk about the things I’ve learned after years of therapy, and what I did to get myself to being healthy again, but what worked for me may not work for you. Healing is an individual accomplishment, and a personal journey. Our struggles and our coping mechanisms may be similar, but they are not exactly alike. We are all individuals, and have our own ways of healing from the abuse.

So the more I try to write about these things, the more the blog is about me, and not about the subject of child abuse. The same goes for the tech blog, the more I share myself, and give it some personality, the more the blog is about me, with a subtext of technology. I started out thinking the two would be completely different and find myself thinking that really they aren’t that much different. They represent two different aspects of me. There are many other aspects that get only brief mention, not whole blogs, but they are all part of me, and they intertwine quite often, despite my plans of keeping a “wall” between these two areas.

The bottom line is, to understand who Mike is, you need to see all of the different things that make me what I am, and both of these blogs do that in part. They intertwine because the subject areas intertwine within me. You can’t truly understand the driving forces behind my love of technology and internet communications without taking into account the severe distrust that comes with dealing with people face to face for me. At the same time you can’t fully understand the enjoyment I get out of doing the abuse site because of the way I was able to learn about technology by working on that site. The audiences aren’t the same for the sites, but they are both part of me. The only way to truly understand me, at least the parts of me that are there to be understood online, is to understand how both of them fit together.

Ultimately, if you read both of these blogs, and my wife’s blog, (because she’ll include day to day things that we do that aren’t part of my blogs sometimes) you might get a fair picture of who I am and what I’m about, but it’ll still be incomplete because I don’t know myself completely. It’s a life-long journey of searching and learning about myself, and trying to better myself, and these sites are both part of that process. I don’t understand those who think they can understand someone by reading what they write, because most of us don’t even understand ourselves, let alone other people. The best we can do is write what we know, as of now, and keep learning and communicating.