One blogger’s musings about the struggle to find harmony between life at work, and everything outside of that world.

My prevailing thought today is the balance between the varying extremes in my life. As someone who works in the public sector, and who has to directly deal with holidays and other religious or culturally heralded events, I have always had to just smile, nod, and turn my cheek whenever the subject comes up.

Honestly? It makes me sick. Small talk about the weather is one thing. I personally think all small talk is pointless and inane, but I recognize that it has different layers, or echelons. But having to field questions about what I do for Easter, Christmas, etc., and not being able to be honest about it, just drives me crazy. Perhaps I’m being paranoid? I’m sure that maybe if I said that I don’t have a religion, or that I don’t celebrate what most people commonly do, it wouldn’t automatically get me fired. But it’s a slippery slope that I don’t want to go down. Until I get to the point in my life where I actually get to do what I want, and get paid for it, like, say, write, or make video games, I have to be careful. I don’t enjoy this fact, but the reality is at the moment, I have to work the job I do so I can eat, and pay such fun things as rent. So offline, I censor myself.

What I am getting at, is that there is a balance I am struggling to maintain between the world of the professional, which I am forced to be involved with by necessity, and the world that I consider to be my true domain, where I am honest, free, and creative. In the Internet Age, nothing that makes it onto the World Wide Web is sacred, and privacy is quickly becoming an outmoded concept.

In a nutshell, as I continue this personal journey of creativity, expression, and exploration on this blog of mine, I will spend a fair amount of time looking over my shoulder. Nothing that I say here is intended in any way, shape, or form, to be anything but my own personal view of the world, and it has nothing to do with my employer or any single person that I work with. But I’ve run into too many social media watchdogs to assume that everything will automatically be just fine. Companies spend considerable time and money combing the internet for anything that could be construed as bad publicity for them. I have personally encountered encroachment onto my own privacy by an employer, who apparently was more interested in investigating what their employees do on social media than on stopping theft by shoplifters. I am an absolutely dogged proponent of free speech and said right granted by the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, I am also someone who barely makes enough money to do more than live paycheck to paycheck, so I have no choice but to keep my mouth shut at work about my beliefs even when others try to push theirs down my throat.

It is a difficult line to walk.

FIN