Walking the Disclosure Tightrope

I started this blog almost two years (and 89 posts) ago.

Back then, I intended it as a way to document--and to share--the work I was creating in all of Jude Hill's classes.  It started as a crafts bulletin board of sorts, but one that had extra space for my thoughts, doubts, or pride in a particular piece. And, to my amazement, the bulletin board immediately talked back, in the form of unusually perceptive, often sidesplitting, and always supportive comments from creators around the world.

The back and forth created a link...a net between us...an inter-net.

Women I may never meet feel to me like an intimate community and they...you... have become my daily bread. (And listen up, those of you who muse on the mysteries of this internet relationship thing.  I carried on a wild online romance with a guy I never met and eventually wound up married to him, so I fully trust the reality of these feelings.) This trust led me to start tacking up more personal things on the bulletin board. My dogs, my home, my trips...and then, my moods, my anxieties....my sorrows.


Which, in case you were wondering what the hell I am trying to say, brings me to what I am trying to say.

It is this: I often feel like I am walking a disclosure tightrope. I feel on solid ground when it comes to protecting others in my world from my little camera and my big mouth. But where exactly is the balance when it comes to me? Where is the line between way too much personal information and Truth that could create more intimacy? Grace wrote this last night, at the very time this question was circling around my brain:

 "...if you would ever want to know someone's Story,  if you would ever ASK them about it,  you should need to be prepared to listen for days and months and maybe even years. You should be prepared to LISTEN to ALL of IT,  all the seemingly fragmented threads and keep listening,  keep paying such close attention that you become familiar with the fragmented threads and begin to see how they tangle to become the whole,  to become the Experience of the Story."

I guess the answer lies in how much of my story I want known. But that is a different issue from how much story I want to tell. Because the truth is that writing here feels exhilarating. I had stopped writing when I left my career and getting back to it felt like finding a missing limb. When I write, I feel stretched and limbered and deeply sated, the way my muscles feel after exercise. When I don't write, my soul feels fat.

And like most exercise, the deeper I go, the better I feel. But...well, you get it, right?

Hence my question. To myself, to you who blog. Do you run into this question? How do you answer it for yourselves?