How personal is TOO personal?

Yesterday, I drafted a post for here about something earlier this week that put quite a few things into perspective for me, but upon finishing it I realised I just couldn't share it with the world. It was too emotional for me and too indiscreet for everybody else involved. I've also made social media past previously which have landed me in hot water, professionally and personally, and maybe my memories of those influenced that realisation also. I won't describe those past incidents for obvious reasons (and I also don't want to bore you). Instead, I think I'll just give my answers to the question in this post's title.

Social media can track people's trajectories, private and public. Within that it's a useful, if often very dangerous, platform for expressing ourselves, if we're having health or family problems et cetera. It takes serious balls often to reveal such information even in in-person discussion, much less online. But were you enduring something that serious and you were active on social media, I think the time would come, whenever it did, for you to take the plunge. Life demands risk-taking sometimes, and by posting about your own issues you would be raising awareness about them for everybody's benefit, and once something is posted online, it's there in some form basically forever. But that said, I certainly do not condone nosiness or stalking.

When it involves your family or friends, I guess that's something I should let you all decide as to whether it should be publicised or not and if so, how. But to my mind, if it involves something they have done, you should consult them first, not use their real name(s), or best of all, try to have a heart-to-heart with them in person. However, I should confess on Facebook last year, on a page for an event we were both attending I posted to explicitly ask a friend if she could bring a DVD of mine which she'd "borrowed" over a year earlier. A few minutes later I got a private message in which she went right off at me, somewhat understandably, but as I told her then, when I lend things to people and don't get them back, I get very impatient, and I asked her as nicely as possible about it. Thankfully, though, it ended there, she finally brought me the DVD back on the night, and we're still friends.

But I digress. I'm not here to indoctrinate or lecture. I just don't want you to make any of the mistakes I've made online. They all cost me a lot, and educational though they have been, there is a darker side to that silver lining.