Staying Quiet
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the years is that often saying less is more. In my profession (sales), being able to deliver your message concisely will get better results than a rambling dissertation. I’ve learned how to create effective messaging in 100–150 words or less. As someone who studied language, I find this skill invaluable.
Unfortunately bipolar disorder makes it hard for me to follow my own advice, because I get extremely talkative in my manic states. This has improved a lot since finding the right medications. I’ve lost jobs over my mouth and little more. I always seem to manage to find the wrong thing to say.
I am also notorious for deleting quite a lot of what I post online. I wish not to be Googled and have any information about me come up, so that paranoia drives a lot of it.
Best to just stay quiet.
My thought is that the less information people have about me, the less they can judge me. I prefer to remain mysterious. This also makes it pretty hard for people to connect with me, though. I remain distant and removed. Staying quiet comes at a price.
I don’t understand people with public Facebook profiles. You’re just giving people fodder to judge you on. A job might look at that and decide against you as a candidate because of a post you deemed totally innocent. I worry for my boyfriend who is currently involved in a custody battle with his ex. He keeps a public Facebook and I fear he may live to regret that. That shit comes up in court, and anything you say can and will be used against you.
I know people judge because I do it myself. It’s a human thing. I recently looked up my interviewer on Facebook and saw that he had some trophy wife and kids, and was a Trump supporter. I knew right off the bat that we wouldn’t get along, but I went to the interview anyway. Turns out I was wrong, and I made an incredibly positive impression on him despite not being like him at all, a.k.a. a liberal spinster. It opened up my eyes a little bit about how dangerous judgments can be. He was probably one of the most genuinely nice people I’ve ever met, and I regret that it didn’t work out with that job and that we won’t be working together. It just goes to show that even nice people can be Trump supporters, somehow. I don’t understand how decent people can support such a vile human being, but apparently it is possible.
People forget that the internet is forever. It’s interesting to me as a linguist because temporary transmissions were never really intended to become permanent, but that’s what’s happened with the rise of Facebook statuses and tweets. We have full documentation of someone’s thoughts in a particular moment in time, and that documentation lives on forever in Google’s cache or the Wayback Machine. Even if you delete it. Literally anything you say anywhere on the internet could come back to haunt you someday. This is why I work in cybersecurity. I am incredibly passionate about keeping shit away from prying eyes.
It’s hard staying quiet in a world that wants you to be loud. You post one thing, and it asks if you also want to post it to this platform, or that platform…no, I don’t want to put myself out there everywhere for the world to see and judge. Let me say this one thing, quietly.
The only place I feel comfortable expressing my true self is where I do not associate with my real identity. Even my Facebook is heavily filtered for high positivity content, which does not reflect my true mood state at all times. I just know my audience now a little better than I have in the past, when I treated Facebook more like Twitter.
I enjoyed a pretty sizeable readership of 3500 followers on Twitter at my peak, through no effort expended on my part in terms of marketing myself or asking for follow backs. I just shared my thoughts with the world anonymously and it worked. People were interested. I abandoned the project because I became a happier person and didn’t have the same anger and despair that historically drove a lot of my tweets. Perhaps we can hope that depression will strike so I can start up the Twitter again. I wonder if any of my followers miss me.
I feel pretty safe sharing myself here, too. This is definitely a healthier and less contrived version of myself. I may never be the type to feel comfortable baring my inner emotions publicly, but maybe I don’t need to be, either. Maybe it’s okay to lay low.
