i'm not particularly gossip savvy

It's true, I'm not particularly gossip savvy. I read, but with disjointed inconsistency (mainly I just pile up papers and magazines I intend to read until they are months old, with the vision of media acumen on my mind). But I am getting better...however slowly.

One site I never fail to read is Oh My God Seattle, a blog by my very close and oldest friend Steven (we've been friends since we played in the kiddy pools of our preschool days). I read Steven's blog religiously, logging in three, sometimes four times a day from my far away London flat to see if he's managed to update any posts with anecdotes of personal hilarity from home sweet home, despite the illogical time of day it is due to the time difference.

It was here on Steven's blog (which you really should check out :D) that I first read about Emily Gould, a young New York writer and former Gawker staffer. Emily, after suffering from the rising Internet epidemic of the overshare, wrote the New York Times Magazine cover story called Exposed all about her time and Gawker and what she's learned, subsequently, about herself.

I don't pretend to be a media critic, and it's true after reading the piece, that I feel for the girl – in fact, I can relate to her. In my personal life I've found myself to be a victim of the proclivity to overshare. It's not that I thrive on the attention (although everyone does enjoy a bit from time to time), I've just found myself to often too willingly give away personal experiences and thoughts of my own in an effort to weave some sort of meaningful exchange with people I meet and feel close to. Sometimes this is a wonderful thing that spawns the beginnings of a great friendship. Sometimes it's too much too soon. Luckily, I tend to keep what I post here, and in other freely accessible media, relatively removed, and when included, veiled.

But I've also come to accept that the path of most artists (and of course, writing is a form of art) is one that is almost always emotionally embedded. So how do you reconcile the two?

In her self-realizing story Emily talked about the experience of losing her willingness to blog – essentially writer's block. She lost her drive to write through the thespian means she had created. I find myself constantly not writing, not blogging, as I've intended to. If Emily took it too far, have I not taken it far enough? Is it writer's block or something else? I am exceedingly private about certain things, but of course, everything I write about is essentially personal on some level, so by that token, does all writing become an act of masked oversharing?