On being perceived online
Despite my fairly large and public online presence, I am a private person, and balancing that is not easy. Here’s what I keep out.
On Friday, 3rd October I had my very first ever meeting where I was in the role of a mentor, rather than a mentee. It was a new experience for me, something that I was excited about that also came with a boatload of responsibilities: another human made a decision to trust me with being able to help them in some way. I want to live up to that, or find out if I can’t, and communicate that. So far it seems like it’s a good fit, but time will tell. My measure of success on this is if in a couple of years they’ll think back to these conversations and think “yeah, Gabor helped me figure some shit out for the better!”
During that call they said something that stuck with me: it doesn’t appear that I spend the maximum amount of time away from a computer when I don’t need to be just by looking at this blog, and they were right.
I do not put the majority of my life on here. This blog has a curated version of me – something I’m consciously working towards. I rarely put here that I do woodworking in my garage, or what I’m working on. I don’t put my love of LEGO and the sets I complete on here. I don’t put my drawings, illustrations, writing on here. I don’t talk about cycling, I don’t talk about motorcycling, I don’t talk about climbing, I don’t share the myriad dumb memes I come across, and I don’t use this blog to shitpost. They are incredibly personal, and other people online should not see it. When I talk about other people, I do my best to portray them as non-specific as possible; I use the gender neutral “they” and I don’t talk about my personal life, except for a few times when something important happens. I don’t have these people’s consent, and I don’t want to put them into a position where they have to make a choice about this, so I leave them out. And most importantly, I do not put anything about my mental health here: what I’m happy for, what I’m sad about, what was crushing, what makes me feel like crap, what is something I don’t want to do, but feels necessary to do, and so on.
On top of all of this, my name is very unique; it’s plastered on the very top of the page you’re on at the moment, and if you plop that into Google, the first two or three pages of results are going to be about me. Most of them I control. I can’t hide, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. So I do my best to use this to my advantage. I blog, I help, I share, I experiment publicly, but I rest privately.
This ties in nicely with the other article I wrote not too long ago:
Gabor Javorszky
There are levels of closeness. This blog is my Public Relations persona. It’s curated, aggreeable, provocative in just the right amount while also keeping the important parts hidden.
And I’m all right with this.
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash