Professional Space / Personal Space

It’s not either or, professionalism and personal life. They don’t cleanly demarcate.

There’s a tv show called Severance whose conceit is that one can have a personal life that stays personal, and then when a person goes to work–that life is utterly different–in fact, one forgets entirely about their other life and starts fresh.

In the real world (and in the show, actually, complications arise) there is no such clean demarcation. It’s messy. One bleeds into another. While one might run a personal blog, say, anonymously or pseudonymously, if that blog becomes known then it will bleed into work. As in getting dooced. And vice versa, there are people whose work is public-facing may get intrusions into their personal life because of it.

What on earth am I talking about? I’m replying to Nick Simson’s post Short ramble on blog names, identity, and professionalism (whatever that means). He summarizes:

…I’ve been feeling like it might be useful to have a more professional personal profile on the web again, while blogging “on the side”

It’s funny, at various times I’ve gone back and forth on what artlung dot com and what joecrawford dot com mean to me. For a time I was highlighting my skills and portfolio on joecrawford.com and just blogging and whatnot things on artlung.com. It was Al Abut who prompted me to resurrect joecrawford dot com a few years ago. I was complaining about the fact that I couldn’t sort out how to make my website serve the needs of looking for work, and of doing comics, and of blogging.

Al is also a great designer who can take a brief and make something crystal clear. He’s responsible for that terrific, tidy design on joecrawford.com.

And so that sorts it out for me. But I have only 2 sites I really need. One might also have a side business or hobby that likewise represents oneself. I think about doing splintering further, for say, toy robots or beach panorama photos (which I posted on Twitter way back before it turned to shit, and now post these to Mastodon). But for now I’m at a state I like.

So I totally understand the tension. And I think it’s totally expected to redefine ones persona for those professional / personal selves. I hope, Nick, you find a state that you’re happy with.