Mixing personal and academic blogging

I have been agonizing over the past little while about how much of my personal life to expose on this blog. I have decided that there would be no limits — that I would simply write about whatever was on my mind.

I have, of course, considered all of the usual reasons for not divulging too much personal information online: “What about your future employers?”, “You’d be telling complete strangers about your life,” and so on. I don’t mind at all if a potential employer finds out how I got to where I am today. This blog will allow me to paint a more complete picture about my background and skills than a résumé or CV ever could. And as for telling complete strangers about my life, I intermittently have the odd experience (as I’m sure many people do) of meeting people who think they know something about me — but what they think they know turns out to be wrong, or a misunderstanding or exaggeration of something that is true. So it’s nice to have a place where I can straighten out the facts.

It has been suggested to me that I should have two blogs, one for personal matters and another for academic ones. I don’t think that could ever work. First of all, I have no control over which one somebody (say, a potential employer) finds first. Secondly, I think that an academic’s personal life is really inseparable from his work. This is probably true of many professions, but in academia especially a person really couldn’t excel unless he was really passionate about his work, and it was well integrated into his life.

And right now, my personal life is a bit of a mess. I’m supposed to be writing my research proposal, but I haven’t been able to focus on it at all. I have been experiencing major depressive episodes, and along with them, a perpetual writer’s block.

Actually, saying that I have writer’s block is not entirely accurate. I have been more or less completely unable to do anything related to research or academics for the past several months. In trying to overcome this, I have been visiting UW Counselling Services, which is a wonderful resource that I feel deserves more funding from the university. As a part of the process of working out my problems, I have been writing out some autobiographical vignettes. Every time I sit down to work, I think about some incident in my life, and I end up writing about that instead. So I don’t really have writer’s block — I have one writing project blocking another! So I had better get this out of the way first.

– davinci