Anonymity

Here you go. You ready?

My name is Jessica. I am 31. I am married and have been since 1999. I have two boys, and their names are Elijah and Asher. We live in Atlanta.

There. Who's reeling?

Let's strip off a little more, shall we? I have a few internet aliases which shall now be revealed so that those who might have stumbled upon me elsewhere might know me for who I am. Here they are: Punk, Chahhead, Jolliebell.

Hi. *wave* I'm Jessica. How's it going?

I need to be honest; that's what this comes down to. I need to be able to say the names of my boys and reference our setting and speak of myself in the third person if I so desire because sometimes, I so desire.

So, in all honesty, I swore I wouldn't open a blog until I finished writing my book(s), but I'm so burnt out, writing thousands of pages over the last nine and a half months, and I'm starting to turn my attention elsewhere, mostly Twitter, and my head is becoming full of things I wish to say but have no outlet from which to speak. Write. You know what I mean. Stop nitpicking.

For instance, I noticed lately that the statuses I post for Facebook and Twitter are never duplicates, one to the other. NEVER. And there's a reason for this: audience.

My husband -- whom we shall refer to as either Bryan or the Mister from here on because that's who he is -- once described Facebook as a big room of our friends and family, just hanging out and chatting (and farming... you know who you are). That's who my audience is there: friends and family. I post dorky things my kids have said or done and update those who live far away (everyone) about what's going on with us down here in the ATL (See? Like how I referenced where I live? Nice, right?). But I never post the more random thoughts that slip through my head. Those I save for Twitter.

I only have a small following, and most of those are either family or nearly-spammers (you know who you are), but I have a couple of people who follow me (whom I also follow) that are neither, and these tend to be the people I'm thinking of when I very carefully construct the tweets that I post. They're a different audience, and, in a way, I'm giving them a different character, another side of me than those on Facebook see. I'm not a mom & housekeeper & homeschooler; I'm a music snob & caffeine addict & writer. It's freeing in a way, but, in that same way, it's just another pigeon-hole.

Here, I'm laying it out. I'm all of me, and I'm not sure how well I'm going to do with that since I don't know who my audience is and I myself am still trying to figure out how all the pieces of myself fall together, what the whole picture looks like. But, in the meantime, I'm going to write as though you, the audience I someday might have, is seeking the whole picture.

Welcome.