Ran across this in a…

Ran across this in a disability blog entry:

There are drawbacks to this. Sharing or not sharing information about ones health is an extremely fraught decision; some people consider this information rude and gross (even when the actual content is totally innocuous), it can invite unwanted questions and speculation, and there are people who will use your undisguised behavior or the information you have volunteered against you in the future. It amounts to a choice between a life of concealment, which can quickly drain a persons spirit and often aggravate their actual condition  and a life of vulnerability, never knowing what will be held against you, or by whom.

And was struck by how much of it would apply to my life in my early twenties -- not around health / disability issues, but around sex activism, bisexuality, poly, and being out in general. For the most part, I've been richly rewarded for being transparent about my life. But every once in a while, someone takes a stab at me for it, like the parent who wrote to my department at Utah telling them that I (gasp!) wrote about sex. And maybe they should fire me. That was fun.

I'm not planning on changing my transparent approach to life. For the most part, my age and parental status and settled het-primary-partnership act as buffers these days -- people are a lot less outraged by me than they used to be. Even once they find out about the bi/poly stuff, they seem to see it much more as this odd thing I do on the side, and much less as a direct challenge to het-normative family structure. And while I still write about sex explicitly, I write about other things a lot more often. So in some ways, the sex work I do is easier now.

But on the other hand, I also have more to lose than I used to, in terms of career, reputation, and family relationships. It's one thing if someone takes a stab at me, but if they took a stab at my kids, like the folks who had the grandparents sue for custody when they found out about the poly parenting... well.

I'm generally mild-mannered, but if someone attacked my kids or my relationship with them, then I guess we'd find out just how much hell I can raise.