Privacy

6/8/24

One unusual trait I hold is that I don’t particularly care what other people know about me, even my most private thoughts. But it concerns me a great deal how much I reveal about others, especially those I care about most.

It’s fairly common for me to write posts and take them down very quickly, especially if there’s been no measurable traffic to them. When I do so, I’m not ashamed about my own story, but feel a bit like I‘m violating others’ privacy rights if I reveal too much, even indirectly.

This drives me to hide most of what I have to say inside philosophy and literary criticism. There‘s almost nothing that I write here that isn’t some form of autobiography/autofiction. But that also concerns me from time to time, because when my life appears to be nothing more than a series of riddles, I’m left responding with my own.

It was this feeling of privacy discomfort that led me to destroy my last take on the Montaigne project, which was extremely disappointing to me because I was very pleased with its direction to that point. I don’t know if this is a feeling I need to get over, giving myself space to talk about the people in my life more openly, or if what I’m doing is correct and a useful literary tool.

I write this to point out that there were four essays I wrote this week that I thought turned out pretty well, but I‘ve chosen to unpublish. Perhaps I need to take the ideas and feeling embedded in them and find a less direct way of expressing them.