Private Lives, Public Faces
Where is the boundary between our public lives and our privacy? Do we have the right to keep certain details of our life to ourselves, or should we live as an example of what we are for other people?
These are hard questions. Some religions demand openness, others demand secrecy. Lives and livelihoods can rise and fall based on what religion one belongs to and to whom one gives that information. Other personal issues can be equally as damaging.
So what do we say? To whom do we say it? And how do we have a private life with a public face?
I am a great believer in privacy. Things exist that are simply no one's business, or should be taken simply as fact and not a matter for people to get involved with. One's family of choice, for example: if one chooses to live with a spouse of the opposite sex, the same sex, three women you see as sisters, or any other choice you make, that is private. It is also public, as people can see who lives in the same dwelling.
Our privacy is our own business. We should be capable of being in public and not wearing our affiliations on our sleeve. I can be an author without being a FlameKeeper, be political without being an author, be a FlameKeeper without being a mother. I am all of those things, and they are entirely intertwined inside myself. Who we are should not be internally compartmentalized. But when we speak of things, when we discuss and learn and exchange ideas, who we are needs to be separable. My religion is not public property except when I am being a public religious figure.
There needs to be the ability to separate the discourse from the underlying drives of it. Not everything needs to be public knowledge. People should be valued or not based on who they are and what they do, not the sex of their bedpartners or their view of the hereafter. These are important aspects of the person and irrelevant in public discourse unless it directly applies.
When we believe we must live as examples, that our private lives must be public, we lose a portion of ourselves. We lose the ability to change and the ability to adapt, because our identity becomes caught up with an image. When we keep ourselves too private, we lose the ability to discuss large portions of our lives and leave the impression that certain options simply don't exist.
We need to learn when to be public and when to be private as individuals. And, as a society, we need to learn when to allow someone's privacy to become public and then to go back to being private. Not everything is our business.
Questions:
How do you know when to keep something public or make it private? Can one aspect of your life move back and forth as is appropriate?
What do you do when the public sphere encroaches too far into your privacy? What if your privacy encroaches into your public life?
What parts of people's lives do you think should be kept public? Kept private? Can you separate your public faces while still remaining whole as a private individual?
These are hard questions. Some religions demand openness, others demand secrecy. Lives and livelihoods can rise and fall based on what religion one belongs to and to whom one gives that information. Other personal issues can be equally as damaging.
So what do we say? To whom do we say it? And how do we have a private life with a public face?
I am a great believer in privacy. Things exist that are simply no one's business, or should be taken simply as fact and not a matter for people to get involved with. One's family of choice, for example: if one chooses to live with a spouse of the opposite sex, the same sex, three women you see as sisters, or any other choice you make, that is private. It is also public, as people can see who lives in the same dwelling.
Our privacy is our own business. We should be capable of being in public and not wearing our affiliations on our sleeve. I can be an author without being a FlameKeeper, be political without being an author, be a FlameKeeper without being a mother. I am all of those things, and they are entirely intertwined inside myself. Who we are should not be internally compartmentalized. But when we speak of things, when we discuss and learn and exchange ideas, who we are needs to be separable. My religion is not public property except when I am being a public religious figure.
There needs to be the ability to separate the discourse from the underlying drives of it. Not everything needs to be public knowledge. People should be valued or not based on who they are and what they do, not the sex of their bedpartners or their view of the hereafter. These are important aspects of the person and irrelevant in public discourse unless it directly applies.
When we believe we must live as examples, that our private lives must be public, we lose a portion of ourselves. We lose the ability to change and the ability to adapt, because our identity becomes caught up with an image. When we keep ourselves too private, we lose the ability to discuss large portions of our lives and leave the impression that certain options simply don't exist.
We need to learn when to be public and when to be private as individuals. And, as a society, we need to learn when to allow someone's privacy to become public and then to go back to being private. Not everything is our business.
Questions:
How do you know when to keep something public or make it private? Can one aspect of your life move back and forth as is appropriate?
What do you do when the public sphere encroaches too far into your privacy? What if your privacy encroaches into your public life?
What parts of people's lives do you think should be kept public? Kept private? Can you separate your public faces while still remaining whole as a private individual?
posted by Vieva @ 1:23 PM
6 Comments:
At 5:07 PM,
Anonymous said…
In certain social circles I hang at the edges of, there's a phrase that's fairly popular: "The personal is political". I hate it.
To me, that phrase connotes the notion that I'm always obligated to be on stage, that my actions must be cast in a light of political activism, and sometimes I just want to go buy a gallon of milk without Making A Statement, y'know?
I spend a lot of time with my life in the liminal spaces between public and private. I consider this normal, more or less; most people have a bunch of stuff in that liminal space, where people know that about them, even if it's not something they're involved in.
I mean, people know that I'm married. I even do the societal-normal wearing of the ring on the appropriate ring finger (or rings, rather; I wear both engagement and marriage band). Public? Private? Liminal.
This gets more fraught if one's trying to be in the liminal space about things that aren't normal or mainstream -- the closeting issues. Like the comment I'm thinking of sending to that guy Jim Wallis -- pointing out that if I treat my religion as being the sort of given he does in discourse, people will talk about my religion and whether it's legit, not my ideas.
I get firm about keeping those things in the liminal space, more or less, because otherwise that sort of normalcy is only available to people who make 'normal' choices.
Privacy can get entangled with secrecy that way, which isn't always a good thing. Things go rancid sometimes when kept under wraps. And if I need to, say, take a religious holiday off and get consequences for it that a follower of a different religion would not, then we're back to the personal suddenly becoming political, and that's just irritating.
Okay, this was not my most coherent comment ever. ;)
At 5:15 PM,
Vieva said…
Maybe not the most coherent, but it does make sense. :)
But I'm not *Pagan* when I'm going grocery shopping. I am a Pagan who's shopping, and my religion may well influence my choices .. but I'm not /being Pagan/ when I'm grocery shopping! (I may well be /mommying/ when I'm grocery shopping, but that's a little hard to hide. :D )
The problem is, the personal IS political. And it's private. And it's finding somewhere between in that liminal space that's so incredibly hard to manage. Because as you said .. if it's too private, it becomes a secret and something that must be hidden. But too public, and you become Pagan-woman (or whatever the issue is) and lose some of your identity to the label.
At 5:32 PM,
Anonymous said…
I've been pagan while doing grocery shopping -- and there were no damn bell peppers in the produce section that I considered worthy of using as an offering, which pissed me off no end.
But all that was *public* about that was that I was cranky at the fact that the bell peppers available were pretty awful. ;) (Most of them were bruised, a couple were slashed and going brown around the edges. I'm not kidding that they were lousy bell peppers. I spent, like, ten minutes going through the bin for the ones that didn't suck.)
I'm always list-of-adjectives when I'm out, in, or otherwise. Most of the times those adjectives aren't terribly important to dealing with other people, so they just don't come up. Any crazy anal-retentive picky cook would have been just as affronted by those peppers as I was. ;)
At 5:49 PM,
Vieva said…
well yes. Your internal life is always the same .. you can't turn that off because you're in a new place. (if you can, you never meant whatever it was in the first place).
I think there's a difference between shopping and wanting something for a Pagan purpose (which sounds bizarre to me .. hmm) and screaming in the middle of the store "how am I to give these as an offering to my gods!?!?!? Gods will smite you for the crappiness of your bell peppers!"
I'd be ticked that I couldn't get what I wanted .. but all anyone would know was that I couldn't get the produce that I wanted. Not that it was for an offering. None of their business kinda thing, y'know?
At 5:56 PM,
Anonymous said…
Sounds like the point that I make occasionally, that being uncloseted doesn't mean going up to people, standing on their toes, and shouting, "I'm pagan, you gotta problem with that?" (and then getting pissy that people have a problem with having their toes stood on and being shouted at, and wandering off muttering about OMGpersecution). ;)
Your Adjective May Vary. But there's being uncloseted, and then there's being a jackass. And that's in the line between the liminal and the public too. ;}
At 11:07 AM,
Anonymous said…
It is a good point that one's privacy can become secrecy. We see something of this invoked everytime the government wants something once obviously public kept secret---they call it privacy. (The privacy of the dead, unidentifiable in flag draped caskets, for instance??) This large scale abuse of the word "private" makes it that much harder to see where those lines really should be, I think.
The personal may indeed be political---but that does NOT mean every personal moment MUST be publicly political. I mean, our votes are meant to be secret---that is certainly private in a sense, so why would anyone accept that they must publicly act out the deepest points of their identity?
There is a vast difference between grand-standing (noisy fundy style about their Chrisian-ness) and living one's beliefs. I guess since I think my spiritual life is between me and my deities, I have no special need to put it on a street corner or shove it down some one else's throat; so its easy to be private about---natural even. But I don't keep it secret. It isn't "darkest Peru midnight time" when I go out to light my occasional ritual fire. It isn't dark when I walk the Labyrinth with a libation cup in my hand.
And as Darkhawk says, so much of what I do IS in a liminal place that I don't think I could define well in words even if I tried...those things are utterly private. This is a good concept to think about, however, because we are seeing public privacies becoming secretive and yet simultaneously there is more demand to see into the interior lives of citizens. The best defense against doublespeak is to know what you mean yourself when you use a word...and hold to it!
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