The Balance Between Sharing and Protecting
When I started my blog in 2013, it was all about fashion. I wrote about what I was wearing, why I liked certain pieces and where I had found them. It was creative and fun to use the new camera we had received as a wedding gift. Every so often I’d take a photo with Jadyn or include Anthony in a post, but only if it happened naturally… he was usually behind the camera most of the time.
This was long before Instagram Stories or TikTok. Back then, storytelling happened through still photos and blog posts, rarely in real time (this was before carousels existed, when Instagram meant one photo and my blog posts usually had five to seven images.) Everything was thoughtful and organized. I used nights and early morning weekends to write and schedule posts for the week ahead so they could go live while I was working my corporate job. When IG Stories launched, I found myself hesitating. Suddenly we were expected to film our days and talk to the camera, and I didn’t feel like I had anything worth saying. I had built my routine up until that point around composed photos, not spontaneous video, and I wasn’t used to hearing my own voice recorded either. It took time to get comfortable with that kind of sharing.
Eventually, I began to ease into it. I started posting Stories that showed small pieces of my day, what I was wearing, the products I loved, or something I was doing around the house. Jadyn was in school then, so most of it was filmed during moments when I was home or when Anthony and I were traveling together.
When I joined TikTok in October 2019, I saw it as an experiment, a new space to be creative in a different way. I started making outfit transitions to trending songs, focusing on editing and to music rather than talking directly to the camera. It felt fun, light, and more about storytelling through visuals than words. I never expected it to grow into something that would reshape my career entirely.
Over time, though, I started to notice how easy it was to blur the line between documenting life and living it. Somewhere in that process, I began asking myself a question that changed the way I create and how I move through each day.
How much of our story is meant to be seen, and how much is meant to stay ours?
The rest of this post is about what changed once I started protecting more of our life online and off. For those of you in this Substack community, the rest continues below: