Meta-Blogging

I've been thinking a bit about the digital face I present. Blogging allows you to craft a persona that may or may not match your real-life self. Other than the huge canyon separating my oral and written expression skills (guess which one I consider to be embarrassingly inarticulate?), I think I've been pretty honest in how I represent myself.

But since I've selected such a narrowly defined slice of my life to write about, I still sometimes feel that I am being dishonest by omission. By dint of my decision not to blog anonymously and to respect the privacy of those in my life who are not my children (and I suppose at some point I will have to be more circumspect about them as well), I am not able to share the larger picture of my life. Not that everyone would necessarily be interested, but I'm specifically thinking of the bloggers I consider to be friends. It's the nature of the beast that they remain shielded from things I keep private here. (And some of my real-life friends might say that I keep a lot from them, too. I do tend to be an emotion bottler.)

Note that I'm not ever so subtly hinting about a huge hidden drama in my life. My own domicile is quite peaceful, my marriage terrific. But when people I am very close to are going through a difficult time, it does affect me profoundly. And sometimes it's tempting to vent here, to express my emotional response to what's going on. I know, I know, I could keep a private journal, but I've never been able to do that consistently. The public nature of this blog keeps me far more disciplined than a notebook tucked inside my nightstand drawer ever will.

I know I'm not the only blogger who faces this dilemma (that might be too dramatic a term) -- few people spill their entire guts, along with those of their loved ones, for all the Internet to see. How do you approach this on your blog?