The semester from hell continues. But it will be over on December 5th! Yay! If I can make it through this week, I promise myself that I will never to this overloading sh*t again.

In the meantime, a cool chick whose blog I love has blessed me with a guest post which is awesome since otherwise I would have had to take time away from my studies to keep some semblance of a normal posting schedule, and there is a huge possibility that anything I write in this state of mind is going to be crap, anyway.

Nisha is preventing you from reading my crap. Thank her.

-M-

Recently I saw a post on one of my favorite blogs which demonstrated an unheard of level of transparency — she wrote about her relationship, which prompted a series of comments including one from her mom, her boyfriend’s mom, and her boyfriend’s brother.

I had to think about that for a second. My parents don’t read my blog. When I had a boyfriend, he definitely never read my blog. Most of my close friends in college don’t read my blog.

Why? Because I haven’t told a single one of them about it.

I’m still paralyzed by the fear of what they would say if they saw it. They don’t get it. A blog, I can hear them say. They would think it was lame, and strange to have conversations with people I haven’t met in real life. But they’d still read anyways. And then I’d be forever paralyzed by the fact that now, so-and-so is reading so I can’t really write what I really think. That is exactly the reason I ended the last two blogs I had: because too many people I knew in real life were reading them.

So all that begs the question: why is it so much easier for us to share ourselves with complete strangers on the internet than with our own loved ones?

Maybe it’s the anonymity of the internet, and the availability of support. Blog readers are a self-selecting group, so it’s easy to find readers who like what you have to say, and easier to disregard the haters because, after all, they’re just names on a screen, hiding somewhere in cyberspace. They’re not your best friend or your mom.

We all live our lives in neat, separate little compartments: there’s work me, and school me, and online me, and relationship me, and family me. It takes courage to break up the compartments and live one transparent life. I doubt any normal person has that kind of courage naturally.

It means your employers could google you and see your personal blog. It means admitting when you’ve messed up, and sharing your flaws and deepest insecurities with the world. It means admitting your goals to the world too, and dealing with it when they hold you accountable. It means your ex might know all your thoughts about your breakup.

It means you can’t control what people are going to think of you, so you have to let go of it. It means take-me-or-leave-me, and leaving it up to people to decide. And then comes the scary part: you might be yourself, and they might leave you. They might mock you. And it might suck. Part of me worries about that everyday.

But lately I’ve been thinking: so what? Maybe we’re better off without those people. Has any successful person ever made it to where they are without losing a friend or two on the way up? Recently I watched a speech by Loren Feldman, where he discussed blogging: “When you put your heart, and your intellectual thoughts, and your emotions out there for people, you’re gonna get beat up for it, and for a number of reasons. The first reason is, most people don’t have the balls to just say what they feel and say what they mean. That’s very scary to a lot of people. Just the fact that you do have the wherewithal to express yourself….a lot of people are going to be intimidated just based on that fact.”

If you find yourself being one person online and on your blog, a different person with your college buddies, a different person with your parents, and another person with your work friends, are you asking yourself why? That’s the question I’ve been asking lately, and it’s yield surprising results. It’s made me start to realize: who cares? It takes baby steps, but it’s easier than I thought to care less and less what people think of you and start living transparently. It doesn’t happen overnight. It won’t be easy. It will sometimes be a struggle, especially for those of us who are accustomed to caring what everyone thinks. But transparency means finally being free to be you no matter what, it means you finally get to quit hiding and casting off the chains of what other people think- and it makes you a whole lot stronger. That is worth a little struggle.

Nisha Chittal is a writer, blogger, and political junkie. She will be graduating with a B.A. in political science in May 2009 from the University of Illinois and plans to pursue a career in Washington. She’s not sure what yet, but it will include her being in the nation’s capital!

Her blog is Confessions of a New Junkie.