Figured it would be a good idea to make note that something I have accomplished over the last few days is meeting with two agencies to get me up and running with them. They were uninterested before but called me this time.
I have done some updating on my samples and have not heard if I did enough or not. I find this annoying.
I now have a Facebook page and a twitter account for my “real” self on the web so that those can be found if people google me. I am working on forming the idea that they will be a limited version of me rather than me pretending to be plastic like I have learned doesn’t work for me in the past.
The model I am using for my real name facebook page it to be much more open to casual contacts instead of people I actually know and are active in my life. The “real” version will be limited to socially acceptable and work related interests whereas my real version is about any part of me that comes to the surface. This here is my real LJ and it gets all the dark and light stuff. Weeee.
I doubt that I will be creating a public LJ. I just don’t have much to say that I want people who will be judging me to see without context. Before I could trust that people who would look for me would actually want to know what I have to say and who I am. Now the internet is used to find info on people to judge who they are before even meeting them. This I am not to pleased about but see how it can be useful. Ergo, I am creating a personal brand. I am not selling myself this way but am limiting my output to the parts that are publicly appreciated. I thank yndy for the example of how to do this without pretending to be something I am not.
Maybe this is where I am getting my ideas about going back to limiting myself and my connections to only surface levels.
I am so glad that I could be of some help in all of this.
My LJ is my “me” space. I’m *very* picky about who I let see all of me these days.
That personal brand stuff is annoying, but it’s the world we live in these days. It’s actually worse to have nothing out there than it is to have too much – because people create their own image of you if there’s nothing to go on. It’s kind of like the “why can’t we find her? Dig deeper – she must be hiding something” mentality.
Meanwhile – we remain multi-faceted people. We just learn to show people the facets that they want to see, and to reserve our whole selves for those we know want to know all of us.
I am me, not false at all, on my ‘public facing’ accounts. But I look at everything I post with the thoughts of “would I walk into my boss’s office and tell him/her this?” and “if my 7 year old reads about this, or her ‘friends’ do when she’s 15, will this be something I regret posting openly?”
It helps.
Don’t limit all your connections – just pull back to the ones that you know like You the You that you are. Everyone else gets the “you that you know they can handle.”
((((((hug))))))))
Regarding limiting connections: and those that you suggest I hang on to are who? Where?
I realize I am being overly dramatic and extremist but that is how I am feeling right now. I am in the part of my cycle where I have gotten too tired to reach out to connect with others and no one if filling the gap. I have begun the process of getting to accepting that and making my life for me and me alone. Problem with that is that I tend to get annoyed when someone gets around to bothering to actually show up. I do know I need to find a different sort of people to hang out with. I am drawn to the very busy and I do a damn good job training them to wait to hear from me. I have tried to cut back on that training but it doesn’t seem to be working.
Part of saying screw them all has allowed me to do all the cable stripping and rewiring of my tv and video machines which I have been avoiding for over a year. I am a lot stronger if I cut myself off. Yes, this will probably be the main topic for this week’s therapy session.
Haven’t you learned, there is no one that can handle the You that You Are. I think the closest is what you have with M. And you know how blessed you are. I tend to break those that I show the me that is all of me. It looks good for awhile and then they get a break and end up running for it. Still working on how to stop that cycle.
The surface level version of me is in the batting circle getting ready for any encounters I have. That is the version everyone likes. The me that is me is only for me right now. Some of it leaks into text for a later version of me to see.