Tuesday, February 9, 2010

About boundaries . . .

I've been told that my last post was titillating and kind of a tease.

Well. It's that constant question of how much I is TMI? I want to be myself on my blog and not feel paranoid about imagined, conservative ghosts of the future haunting me.

Even now, I feel compelled to say that taking off clothes is a metaphor -- a real common, overused one, I know, but still good. And that kind of disclaimer just makes me feel silly. It's a little bit like the fifties sitcoms with the couples sleeping in separate twin beds. Who am I trying to please?

I work with young people. I want to write for young people. And I'm afraid of the ideas people have about how people who do those things should and should not behave. That was part of my unpublished boundary rant.

Any healthy person establishes their own lines and boundaries for sharing online. But I am an adult, and I don't write this blog for young people -- not particularly -- I write it for myself, and my friends, and other writers, and any other humans who stumble along. And when I stumble on strangers' blogs, I like the ones that open a door onto other lives. I don't need gory details, but I like to discover a human behind someone's words.

If I ever write about anything truly titillating -- and let's be honest, that last post wasn't very -- anybody who's not old enough for it won't stick around to read it. I'll bore them to tears.

Writing and making plays for young people shouldn't mean that I'm not allowed to do those things with adults in mind. Obviously. So why does this freak me out so bad?

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