Locked Out

Over the past few weeks I have enjoyed reading One Pic A Day's blog, http://onepicaday.blogspot.com, where every day he posts one photograph he has taken during that day. According to his blurb he started taking one picture everyday in 1989 and has continued to do so ever since - for almost twenty years now. I discovered the blog when it was listed by blogger as a blog of note and only last night looked through some of his retroactively posted pictures from 1989. What an incredible achievement it is to have a tangible artifact, a memory, from every day of your life for the last eighteen years. What a great way to reflect and gauge how much you've changed.

As of today, however, the settings of One Pic's blog seem to have been changed and now only people who have been invited are able to read it. I suppose this may be because, having been featured as a blog of note, he must be having thousands of hits on his blog every day. He has been blogging anonymously and giving each of his friends a pseudonym but the photos he has published do not conceal the identity of the person of people they feature. Due to the upfront and honest nature of the blog maybe he feels that such a wide readership is not wise. I don't know. But it must make him uncomfortable putting so much of himself out there, knowing that it could potentially be used against him.

It's an interesting idea, that. The more you reveal of yourself, the more you let go, at least in an emotional sense, the more vulnerable you become. But, ironically, perhaps the reverse is true. For it takes great courage to make that leap, to demolish those barriers that you develop throughout life as a way to shield yourself from the slings and arrows that might come your way. And if you can muster that strength then are you really vulnerable to anything? If you can do that then I think you become something that other people fear. Without that uncertainty, without any reservation, if you are comfortable enough with who you are to put it out there for the world to see then what can anyone possibly do to take that away from you? People can no longer label you as anything; if they do it won't matter to you because you already know who you are. You rid yourself of the self-doubt inherent in living your life according to what other people think of you. To once and for all be able to examine yourself and comfortably and openly say 'this is who I am' is possibly the most liberating thing you can do. This kind of attitude is, I think, quite rare but I also think that it needn't be. While I'm not sure how you go about finding that freedom I think it's something worthy of pursuit.

And so I came to start writing this blog. I was encouraged or perhaps inspired by One Pic's eighteen years of commitment to an idea that, when he first started out, I'm sure he had no idea would ever become such a part of his life. Sure, I'm writing this anonymously - I never said I was liberated myself - but even so there's something incredibly cathartic about just putting my thoughts and experiences out there for the world to read; thoughts that are normally relegated to the dark recesses of my brain where they just seem to get in the way. I don't have any grand expectations about this blog (I'm not even sure anyone has read it yet) but just having enough faith in myself to start writing - writing anything - is a big deal for me. As many a great person has said, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I'm not sure where I'm going yet but I may well be on my way.