I did it. I came clean about my depression. Now what…?

So a few weeks ago, I did what I swore I wouldn’t do. After nearly a year of telling myself that it was better that people didn’t know about my condition, I wrote a post on my public blog detailing my mental health problems.

I got virtually nothing done for the next few days as I sat watching Google Analytics rack up numbers, and the Facebook post where I shared the link accrue likes and comments as if they were going out of fashion. I watched with a sort of detached fascination as people I hadn’t spoken to for years messaged me telling me how brave I was, and that what I wrote had really resonated with them.

Even a few weeks on, I’m still processing what that means. Amongst other things, I’m not sure how to respond to people calling me brave, I’m scared about writing a follow-up that will fall short of the initial post, and I don’t know how to deal with my new status among my IRL friends as a quasi-expert on mental health.

That’s not why I’m writing here though. See, the issue I have is that I want to use my ‘public’ blog as my space to muse on mental health issues now. One of the reasons I decided to open up publicly was because I wanted to take a more active role in driving discourse in mental health among my peers. Yet for all my shows of openness, there is still a lot that I want to explore in a more private domain — stuff that I’m either not ready to talk about in great detail publicly (e.g. my battles with self-harming, or my attempts at suicide), or things that relate directly to other people in my social circle (e.g. how my depression has affected, and been affected by, relationships). In either case, I think there is a significant potential to upset people I care about.

The more I open up on both platforms — my ‘public’ blog, and this ‘hidden’ one — the more chance there is of the two worlds colliding. It’s not a big chance, I grant you, but I do have precedent. Quite a few years ago I was in essentially the same situation, and one of my close friends stumbled onto one of my ‘hidden’ blogs. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I have quite a distinctive writing style, and that, coupled with some rather obvious references to events and mutually recognisable people, meant that the ‘hidden’ blog didn’t stay hidden for very long.

What exacerbates this problem is the fact that there is already some content on this blog that I want to move across — themes I’ve talked about, even analogies that I’ve made (Ok, like one analogy… I’m quite proud of my Hoover Dam reference, and I really want to use it on a wider audience…). I am concerned though that it is a little like Russian Roulette at this point. The more I post here, the more chance there is of it being connected to the ‘real’ me. Ultimately, I guess that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I’m just not ready for it yet.

If anyone has been in a similar situation, and has any advice, I would be eternally grateful…