Apparently people get uncomfortable if one doesn’t disclose personal information, and if one answers questions about oneself without venturing much information.
Another thing that makes people uncomfortable is extensive use of the impersonal pronoun. People feel happier with “you” or “I”.
Personally, I find the use of “you” in place of “one” quiet presumptive; if I want to say something like, “It hurts when you do this…” I think it sounds like I have to know how everyone else feels more than if I were to say, “It hurts when one does this…”, and it also changes the emphasis from “you and I” in the latter. Enough drivel already.
When one you start writing a journal that you know other people will read, you have to decide how much of yourself you want to give away. In the past, whenever I wrote anything down, I assumed that someone else would find it and read it. This is very frustrating now when I find old journals. They are written in a kind of code, which I can hardly decipher. It also means that I didn’t have much practice expressing myself honestly on paper. I developed some very close friendships as a teenager, and was able to talk quite openly about most subjects. I used to write letters to my friends at other universities. They used to write back. I still have their letters and many of them are drivel now, out of context. Perhaps it’s lucky that I don’t have access to the letters I sent to them – I can imagine that they aren’t drivel without contradictory evidence.
Anyroad, I shall try to be somewhat open if I write in this livejournal. Just to see what happens.