I was talking with a friend of mine recently about the stuff we just won't talk about on our blogs anymore.

I used to be incredibly self-revealing at this site. Nearly every single heart-wrenching feeling I had - good and bad - found me marching up to the computer to document for all time. I almost didn't know how to process the happenings in my life if I wasn't doing it for an audience. During that same time, I also used to slam Irish Car Bombs as a rule, but you don't see me doing that anymore, either.

But damn if those weren't some tasty drinks.

But like all of those tasty Irish Car Bombs, my emotional purging had its place in that particular time of my life. I don't regret talking candidly about my life when I was 23, 24, 25, because that's what made sense at the time. The online world was smaller, I knew the majority of people who read the site, and my internal censor was woefully underdeveloped. But things are different now.

Self-editing is a lost art, and understanding its merits are not typically grasped until a person gets a little older. For the most part, anyone who has been keeping a blog more than three years has jumped on the bandwagon, opting to leave the intimate details of his or her life offline. I said a couple of years back that this site was going to be less about me and my personal travails and more yip-yap about the random oddities. Generally I've adhered to that rule, give or take a few entries here or there.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of comments and emails from people asking me to write "like [I] used to." Yesterday, someone mentioned that if I did, it might help her with what she's going through. And while I appreciate that to some extent, and recognize full well that my years of sharing everything on the Internet set me up for such requests, I'm just not that writer anymore. Plus, it's just not professional. After all, my coworkers - not to mention my boss ("Hi boss!") - know about this site. They'd probably just as soon not stumble upon my angst any more than they have to, you know?

I write all of this not to complain, as it's humbling to know that there are enough people out there who care about what I have to say, but rather to give you an explanation as to why you all don't know every detail about my life anymore, why some of your comments never make it live to the site, and why I don't always respond to some of your emails. I've gone back and forth as to whether I should even write this, but I knew I had to say something.

And you can use the search function for this site, trying any number of terms, but you're not going to find what you're looking for whatsoever. And yes, I know when you're doing it.

Some things have to be my own. They just do. And I'm sorry for that.

Posted by Erin at 11:02 PM | filed under: Odds and ends