What’s my point; not sure I have one.

With the advent of the new year, and having now been on blogger for the last six months or so, I am now giving more serious consideration to going public, but I just don’t feel sure about it. There are three main issues I’m thinking about:

1. I’m boring. And that’s the truth. I thought I would discuss aspects of the kid’s lives on a more regular basis; i.e. what symptoms of autism and other developmental disabilities are like, how they impact our daily routines and family life. That was supposed to kill two birds with one stone: to raise autism/disability awareness, and to let our extended family and friends keep up with us a little more. I know the grandparents are really missing out, and yet I feel like I’m not writing for them even though that was my intention. I don’t post near enough, and at the end of the day, even though there are lots of things that happen that they might find interesting, I’m just so tired. What inspires my get-up-and-go is when I feel passionately about some social issue, like prop 8 (which I deleted already, don’t bother trying to find it, I used too many four letter words), not the mundane details of our banal existence. And I am often inspired by things that really tick me off. I mean, who wants to read that stuff? What a total downer. I should try for shorter (HA!) more frequent posts. I just don’t find myself having the self discipline or energy to do it. Plus I guess that I don’t think I can be horribly entertaining with short frequent posts. Sigh. Our insecurities always undo us.

2. My skills. I thought after six months or so, I would absorb the ups and downs, ins and outs of the technology. WRONG. I have read a lot of other people’s blogs, I have looked at a lot of neat widgets, I have spent a lot of time studying blog “etiquette,” but I don’t think my education in this area is near enough. I would think there is a way to remedy this, like maybe I need to investigate formal (or even informal) training on the subject. There is a certain irony in that I originally was a computer science major at the university, a programmer, to be exact. And now I don’t have a clue. I expected that my reasonable intelligence level would eventually overcome this obstacle, but, not yet. Work in progress, I guess. I am reasonably insecure about my writing skills too, but I don’t give a rat’s butt about that. I have blogging friends and family members who are way more talented than I am, but this is not a talent contest, and I have just as much value and contribution to make. I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing with the technology.

3. PRIVACY. This is an issue in so many different ways for not only me, but my family members, and even third parties. If I’m going to be asserting my opinion in cyber space, do I have a right to keep some of my privacy? If I was writing a newspaper column (a renegade one no less, on a flyer jammed into the middle of the newsprint pages), do I have a reasonable expectation of privacy? I feel like public blogging opens me up to criticism I’m not ready to deal with. There seems to be a definite death of manners and common courtesy on the internet. How much of it can I take? My content of late has rather than personal instead been about my relatively uneducated opinion on certain autism and other social issues. Even then, I think to myself, “who am I to have a written public opinion on Terri Schiavo? Hasn’t her family been through enough pain than to suffer the careless treatment of strangers discussing her situation as water cooler fodder? True, I am arguing in their favor, but it’s not like they asked me.”

I don’t think I realized how insecure I was until I started writing this blog. I can visualize back to junior high school when those kind of feelings reached peak levels, and I think what I feel now is so miniscule in comparison, so as to be virtually disappeared. Perhaps cyber space now is the new frontier of peer pressure and social oversensitivity. The kind of cyber bullying I have witnessed has been excruciating to see.

And then if I’m going to have an opinion, and presumably come under attack, don’t I need to be afraid of the weirdoes coming out of the woodwork? I have small (and large), vulnerable children, and we are out and about in our community. Besides being afraid for their safety, how about their rights to privacy? For instance, I would love to talk about OCD girl more. I think awareness on that topic is very low. But she is horribly self conscious. Even if I’m not concerned about stranger danger, how about keeping the details of her personal life private from family members and friends?

This has been a problem for us in places like church and school. She needed help, but how to ask for it if she doesn’t want anyone to know what the problem is? Thank goodness my son is a little less self conscious, he needs an awful lot of help, and the only way he is going to get it is by being as visible and assertive as possible. He LIKES wearing his autism shirt, because in the absence of a visible cue (such as a cast on a broken limb or leg braces or the physical characteristics of Down’s syndrome), he doesn’t have to try to explain himself quite so much. I fear DD will have a very circumscribed life because the only thing more hindering than her disability is her desire that no one know about it to the point where she can’t work on it and start to get past it.

Also, there have even been times when I wanted to talk about something in my struggle with the kids and I feel like I can’t talk about casual acquaintances or friends and other family members unless I remain semi anonymous or even totally anonymous. I had an absolutely horrific conversation with a staff member of an institution from where I was trying to get services for one of my kids, and even though this other person doesn’t like me and said rotten things, I still felt like out of respect for her privacy that I shouldn’t repeat the details of the conversation, not to mention worrying about retribution against my child in the form of a lack of cooperation from this person in the future. Yet it was an important step in my journey, the relating of which is supposed to be one of my goals in blogging.

My own growth and path is so closely connected with so many other people that I don’t know how to discuss it and leave them their privacy. One thing I found very helpful was reading the description of the relationships between other wives and their asperger’s husbands, it’s a virtual support group. And if I was to come out of the blogging closet, I would be revealing very intimate details on the relationship between my husband and me (who is, by the way, a very fabulous guy). He is generally very supportive, but what if he doesn’t feel like sharing his personal struggles with the World Wide Web? And suppose his co workers or other professional peers were to stumble across my blog? I have already deleted one post that I wrote around our wedding anniversary this year; it disclosed what may have been some important information for someone else needing empathy in a similar situation. It would have definitely been progress towards my goal of spreading autism awareness. But do I have the right, even with his blessing? I would love to write tributes to all of my parents, and some other mentors, but in order to do so, will I have to completely whitewash everything? If I don’t include the bad with the good, how useful will it be? I just have not been able to reconcile those questions yet; I guess it’s time to perhaps ask some experienced bloggers for their opinions.