thoughts about friends

[magid]

I admire my friends who are able talk about the lows as well as the highs, the bad with the good. I wish I could be that open, sharing of myself, but I find myself time and again keeping the negative things to myself, or talking/writing to a few select people, rather than posting for the world to see.

Some of it is nurture: we didn't talk about negatives much growing up. I think we didn't deal with anything negative very well, becoming emotional, tak ing things very personally, etc. I find myself doing t hose same things, though I want to learn how to react differently.

Some of it is wanting not to give in to lashon hara (lit. "evil speech"), gossip, etc (though a lot of woes are not related to other people at all, just internal stuff). I know that somet imes there's a need to vent, for my health, but this can be done anonymously a lot of the time, and not publicly. I don't want to hurt other people, if I can help it. Nor do I want to hurt other friendships.

Some of it is some stupid idea I internalized early that people would not like me as m uch if I showed the bad stuff, or that they'd think me a bad person for whatever-it-is. Yet I read of other people's less-than-happy moments, and I don't think that of them. Still, that attitude tow ards my own stuff being there is the same.
(Still that old caring about what other people think. I know intellectually that if someone thinks me horrible for something I've done, then I probably don't want their friendship anyway. Yet I'm still in a Jewi sh community, and there are community standards, as well as talk about people (no matter that it's technically forbidden... most people find that one of the easiest things to ignore.), to an extent much greater than other communities I've seen.)

And there's privacy issues. My dad is a privacy nut, not wanting people to know how much he makes, what his SSN is by having it on his license, etc. And I managed to pick up on the idea of privacy, though about other issues than his. Something about controlling the information that I choose to give others, knowing (approximately) who knows which sorts of things about me. Which in the long run is ridiculous.
(Just how bad this is with me: I had second thoughts about making this a public post. )

Still, I am torn. I still have all the old pulls (probably some others, as well, that I haven't managed to form into coherent thought, yet) to not post about negative stuff, yet not posting any of it gives a false picture of myself too. OTOH, do I need to show a balanced, rounded picture to my reading public, as it were, or only to myself?

Side note: Some days I wish LJ had used another term than "friend" for people whose journals I enjoy reading, since I've seen people feel upset when dropped by a "friend," or non-reciprocation of "friend" status.
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Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

Side note: Some days I wish LJ had used another term than "friend" for people whose journals I enjoy reading, since I've seen people feel upset when dropped by a "friend," or non-reciprocation of "friend" status.

I saw something recently (in lj_nifty?) about how you can set up a friends filter called "Default View", and that will be the one that comes up automatically for you. So, you can keep/put someone on your friends list that you're not particularly interested in reading all the time and not have to wade through their posts. I haven't tried it out yet to see how well it works.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think my problem is with the use of the word "friend," which outside LJ has different connotations, rather than the filtering to keep reading stuff I want to read and not something else...

I know what you mean

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

I customized my journal pages a while back to remove LJ-specific uses of the word "friend" whenever possible. I replaced it with phrases that more accurately reflect the way I use the "friends page." There are some total strangers on my "friends list" because their journals seemed interesting.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Privacy is something that has its place. I don't have my social security # on my drivers license either. But I know that Dad's unwillingness to talk about money with anyone other than Mom meant that there was a definite gap in learning about real home economics. I am still trying to get a handle on that.

I have my difficulty showing my problems to other people at times, but for a different reason: I don't think that I can be helped by others on that issue at that time. As for whether or not people like me, well, I've had people dislike me for valid reasons but I've also had people dislike me for totally spurious reasons, and continue to dislike me after those reasons were shown to be untrue. Some people in life will look for any reason to shoot out porcupine quills.

I do show a fair number of my problems, sometimes through grit tooths.

Final note to ponder: Aunt Ada Mae. She remembered all the things she didn't like about how she was raised by our grandfather and made a conscious choice to take the opposing path in most ways when it came to raising her kids - for example, not that there should be no candy but that there should be a weekly candy supply. I'd say she and Uncle Dick did a good job - I wouldn't have any compunctions about bringing any one of them to a Suspects gathering for example, while I don't think I'd ever want to bring Dad to one.

You and I have done well, for varying values of "well", with what we got - and we did get a lot. Just, any number of times what we got wasn't anything close to what we needed..