— CiaoCatherine

Brain nosh: Stop apologizing + get real about what’s real

I’ll peruse Harvard Business Review online once in a while, and recently this lip-smackingly-good food for thought post by Alexandra Samuel entitled 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life came to my attention via Gala Darling‘s weekly roundup.

I shared this with Caitlin, and we discussed.  A few of Samuel’s points really resonated with me.

In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that “reality” includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

This paradigm of valuing “face-to-face” more than “human-to-human” is readily apparent in the way so many people “troll” comments sections on blogs and news sites, saying things they would never dare repeat aloud to someone’s face.  And I know that in my own online experience, I am more likely to use stronger language in an email to someone I know “in real life” than I would in an in-person conversation with the same individual.  The trade-off there is that writing an email to express myself affords time to parse my words, reconsider tone, and remove any unhelpful bias that seeps into my message.

It’s likely most of us have dealt with what I like to call a “toss-and-run.”  It falls somewhere between a hit-and-run and tossing someone under the bus, because it starts out as an accidental personality solar flare but in the heat of the moment, instead of shutting that harmful tack down, we continue on a malicious path: a colleague or friend “throws you under the bus” in a flippant act of passive-aggression via email, in a way they would never dream of doing if you were both in the same room with other colleagues or friends.  You are not face-to-face, but the fallout can still sting.

And from Samuel’s list of 10 reasons to acknowledge your online life as “real” in the effort to stop apologizing for it:

5. When you take your Flickr photos, YouTube videos and blog posts seriously as real art, you reclaim creative expression as your birthright.

Amen!  “Birthright” reminded me of Julia Cameron‘s The Artist’s Way.  This was assigned reading in the very first undergrad writing workshop I enrolled in, and Cameron’s mantra focuses on reclaiming our birthright as creative souls.  I’ve seen Flickr photos that made me gasp with amazement, YouTube and Vimeo videos that made me laugh until my sides ache, and yes, even cry.  I’ve read moving, life-affirming, game-changing treatises and tales in the form of blog posts by friends and strangers alike.  So who are we to devalue our own creative process as it plays out on the internet?  Legitimize your own existence!  Your online life is not youre whole identity, but it is a very real component that deserves your attention and effort.