The most prominent running gag in my recent life is that, whenever I see someone with whom I haven’t caught up in awhile, within three sentences they will mention without prompting that they have been reading all the stuff I post on Facebook. So I am very aware that I post a lot on Facebook.
I admit this was a conscious decision a few years ago, and not an easy one. It is a long process for someone like me to reach the point where you feel enough confidence to consider your work and accomplishments to be worth announcing and promoting to the world. I have friends who write summer blockbusters for a living – if I have a 10-minute play staging at a storefront in Wisconsin, it doesn’t feel like such a grand thing to be trumpeting. Not only am I hyper-aware of being too audacious or proud for my own good, there are always people out there with the impulse to take you down a peg for their own reasons, or who will just get silently sick of your daily rah-rah.
I don’t regret the choice, though. My posts are largely positive, always apolitical, and mostly self-generated, rather than a blizzard of links and memes; not that there’s anything wrong with that. They reflect a facet of my own life, and I am excited to share them, and appreciate the excitement it generates in people I care about. It’s a good check on my own moods and behaviors to think before I post something sarcastic or angry or passive-aggressive; it helps me process out negative feelings.
And I won’t lie – it has actually helped me professionally. If there is one thing everyone in my Facebook node knows about me, it’s that I’m not sitting around over here. It’s one of those laws of the Universe that people who have jobs they want done will seek out a busy person, and that has been good for me.
I was having lunch with a good friend on Saturday and got a reminder, though, that these facets can be misleading. My Facebook can threaten to become a persona rather than my life. I don’t talk very much about the storm of doubts, or the remorseless grind of never making enough money or having enough money, of a life unbalanced because the need to chase and cultivate opportunities doesn’t leave enough time for R&R. I don’t talk about the introspection that comes from another birthday on the horizon without my having reached a professional plateau I can be satisfied with, or how it triggers an awareness of my life progress when my younger sister gets married.
All that is there, and I express it to friends or via my private blog (still LiveJournaling after all these years.) The culture of the written word has basically been overthrown on the Internet, or at least cordoned off and made hierarchical. People spend more time chucking other peoples’ words around – usually on virtual paper wrapped around cyberbricks. But words still have tremendous value to me because, duh, it’s my, like, lifepath.
I am proud to be a generator rather than an aggregator on Facebook. And whenever people share with me their awareness of my ubiquity, they follow it up by saying how happy and excited they are to read about my “adventures” – frustrating and unprofitable though they may be to me, personally. So I guess I will keep at it; although maybe, to be fair, I should dare to take the grin off more often, and remind people that I am not at all immune to the fact that this is a bloody hard pursuit I have picked. A bloody entertaining one when it gets moving, though…