I’ve been blogging a mixture of personal and political posts for ten years. Over the course of a decade of life, bad things will happen. In our case, our “bad things” included the diagnosis of a developmental disorder in a son and two involuntary job changes. I blogged about pieces of those disasters as they unfolded. The full truth wasn’t appropriate for this blog for a multitude of reasons.

Still, my disasters weren’t really, really horrible. Ian’s issues were inconveniences, relatively minor, and balanced by enormous love. Both career changes quickly led to other opportunities and never resulted in financial ruin. A number of times, I’ve wondered whether or not I would blog about events, if something really, really terrible happened. I have found lots of support over the years with the minor disasters, so maybe I would reach out for support when the super bad thing happened. But maybe privacy is a good thing, too.

A few days ago, a few twitter friends linked to a column in the Guardian, which questioned the appropriate-ness of blogging about having cancer. The author, Emma Keller, compared cancer blogging to funeral selfies. That column has since been deleted. Then the author’s husband, Bill Keller, an editorial writer for the Times, doubled down and continued to question the cancer blogger, Lisa Adams. More of the story here and here and here.

Here’s Lisa’s blog.

The Kellers don’t sound like very nice people.