Slicing Off a Finger

I, unfortunately, like to share. Well, except I don't actually like sharing my side of the bed, or sharing a really good bag of candy. But if I ever have a single thought pop into my head, I sure do like to share it. Immediately. To anyone in a .5 mile vicinity. While I do list sharing as one of my top attributes, it, unfortunately, is not always a good one. I get into trouble a lot with my "sharing"- you know the common side effects that accompany such spontaneous regurgitation of thoughts: putting my foot in my mouth; offending; nausea, dry mouth, and diarrhea; grossing people out with my way too personal details; and most destructively, gossiping.

For me, a blog just makes it so I can publish those thoughts to a distance a thousand times fold (by a thousand times, I mean the 7 of you that read my blog [but you guys do live far apart]). In my first post, I made the analogy of my blog to a fairy tale that told of three sisters who were told a secret. I am the sister that can't keep any type of secret in and have to at least share it with the thickets. . . and to my mom, to my friends, to the old lady with purple hair standing in front of me at the grocery store, to my sisters, and all else who may lurk on my blog. So it stands to reason that the more thickets I visit, the more acutely I will suffer from any number of those glorious side effects. So I do what I can to avoid such suffering. And this week, I had to do something drastic, something desperate, something cowardly. Something akin to chopping off my pointer finger to save the nose on my face. . . I edited past posts.

I know. I know what you are thinking- "Oh, the humanity"; "How dare she"; "Boo, whore!" I realize I have violated the sacred law of all journal/blog writing of not going back to change a post once you have written it. Because at the moment, inappropriate as it was, it was honest and true to yourself. If you go back and change it, it's like getting a boob job- no matter how much better you think it makes you look- it's just not the real you and it will never be the real you ever again. I actually had a hard time hitting the delete button on these less than pc posts . I could feel the betrayal to myself. But, if you also recall from previous posts, I am also a milktoast- I avoid confrontation like it's the plague. So while the honorable thing would have been to keep my post as is, and put some backbone behind what I feel and wrote, I edited it. Okay, so technically the honorable thing would have been to not write things that I would feel uncomfortable having anyone read, but apparently honor falls just behind speaking my mind, which falls slightly behind saving face, which falls somewhere behind my amazing ability to load dishwashers full and efficiently, in my list of attributes.

You might not even notice the edits, but that's not really the point. I don't often like to ask questions to reader's on my blog (first off, its so bloggish to end with a question, and second, it implies that I have the gumption to assume that anyone actually reads my blog), but I want to know what other people's take is on editing past journal entries that might tend to embarrass or incriminate (you know the ones that I'm talkin' 'bout).

Dear Void, is it really as big a deal as I feel it is?