Why not leaping into the blogosphere naked?

When I write this post this blog is not online yet. I feel that I’m postponing, hesitating to take the leap. Why am I afraid? It’s the fear of being naked in front an invisible audience, an audience composed of strangers and/ or people that know me very well. But also the fear of being naked in front of no audience at all. How embarrassing to scrape your courage together, take off all your clothes, walk on stage and reveal yourself.. to find out nobody came to watch.

The way this blog is put up is very up-to-date (or so I’m told). If you like my stuff you can share it immediately with your friends, you can join my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter. This way the possibility that my voice gets heard by many becomes quite real. But the opposite is also true. When nobody is listening, joining or following that becomes very visible. The social media become some sort of mirror, a reflection of some sort of value. This upcoming confrontation doesn’t go really well with our – according to Marianne Williamson – next-to-deepest fear: the fear of being inadequate, or, in other words, the fear of being not worthy and having no value at all. And my obvious imperfections as a blogger are many: I’m not a professional writer, I type slowly, English is not my first language, I’m not a zen master, not a marketing guru nor any other kind of guru, I have never published something and I don’t really like the technical part of technology.

So why would I put myself in this position? The answer is connected with another issue, that of what are we valued for. Which is connected to my earlier post ‘Masquerade’. Our society, or we, value fame, success, beauty, talent, superficiality, safety, humor, intelligence, etc. Now all these things can become a mask, a part of an image. I feel strongly that hiding behind our masks or living a certain image is the cause of our suffering. That means that even being successful, beautiful, talented and famous can become very painful. Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Britney Spears are sad examples of that. Dropping our masks will liberate us. And if I really belief that I should back my words up with action. That means that I want to be unconditional in my honesty, I want this blog to be a reflection of my heart. Now that is an ambition that scares the shit out of me.

But then Steve Jobs came to the rescue this morning, speaking to me via his speech on Stanford University as shown on TED: “Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

And so it seems that my heart is leading me to the practice of blogging naked. It will be an exercise in courage, discipline and open heartedness, meanwhile dealing with my fear of rejection, failure and success (yes, there is even a fear of success). Practicing with all these themes will benefit me, I trust that. But there is a bigger picture. What if we start using social media to really open ourselves up? What if we start showing more than one dimensional images and start valuing each other for being complete, imperfect and authentic? I feel that there is a whole new world out there to discover. And who knows, maybe this keyboard klutz can make a contribution.