My life is not an open book

male hands holding an open bookWhat you see is what you get, doesn’t really apply to me. I have a filter that protects me from prying eyes. It’s not that I want to hide the real me from others but I’m an introvert and we’re careful. I’ve also learned to be careful from past experiences. At home I can be myself but in public, I’m reserved. I have thoughts some might not understand. My life is not an open book and I want to keep it private. If I open up to a person, it’s someone I trust. The only one who knows the real me, is myself. Not even my parents knew. They only knew what I was when I was younger. I’ve never told them I write this blog for example. Some things you just want to keep to yourself. You need to do it. If I told everyone everything about myself, the mystery would be lost. That’s what life should be about. If you know everything about a person then there’s no surprises. What kind of life would it be?

People post about what they do on social media. Some keep updating things they’re doing at that moment. Who they talk to and where they are. I find that boring. I don’t care what you ate, if you took a shower, baked a cake or went to a birthday party. I don’t care about what your friends are doing or who they got engaged to. That’s what I keep seeing on Facebook. On Twitter I have ‘only’ 6125 tweets in 7 years I’ve been there. I don’t tweet nonsense. From time to time I do post things I do but that’s not regularly like most people do. I’m not trying to make a world record of tweets. When I have something important to say, I tweet it. I also hate selfies. Every time someone post one, I totally ignore it. Especially celebrities. Like they weren’t enough in the public eye already. If I want to see photos of them, I look for real photos taken by pros. Since camera phones were invented people think they’re all photographers.

Everyone seems to want to be like everybody else. I don’t want to be like everyone. I have a natural filter and know what to tell about myself online. If you read my about page, you know why I don’t post private things. Everybody seems to write about that. I dare to be different. Even though I have Instagram, I don’t post there much. To be honest, I find it a bit boring. It’s just isn’t my thing. I was excited at first when I could finally join last year but now I’m not that much. I follow 14 different one’s and that’s fine. For example I follow @cutepetclub because there’s so many cuties in it. Pets that is. I like looking at other people’s posts but when it comes to posting myself, I’m not that keen anymore. Sometimes I just scroll without looking because let’s face it, what people post there is boring.

I don’t have the urge to get people’s attention and that’s the same in real life. One on one conversations is good enough for me. I get really uncomfortable if someone looks at me. I wouldn’t make Youtube videos because I feel uneasy in front of a camera. It was different when I was a kid. I was cute then. I leave those things to others. I don’t go after things because they’re popular. I’m not the victim of commercials. It’s easy to judge someone by the first impression but I’m more than what people see when they meet me. People give up too easily when they do. That’s one of the reasons I find it hard to meet new people. It’s really their loss and not mine. I’m proud of who I am and if I were someone else, I would be my friend. I always say I’m my own best friend because who knows me best than myself.

Privacy is my right and so is yours

whatever-is-private-will-remain-privateEveryone has the right to privacy, even people in the public eye. It’s your choice what you want to tell people. You don’t need to tell anything about yourself if you don’t want to. People think just because someone is famous, they have the right to know everything about them. You don’t need to know everything. If someone elses life is that important, then your own life must be miserable. They should really get help because following someone elses life too closely is not healthy. Those who spread rumours around must just be jealous of the person. People have the urge to speculate about which celebrity is dating who. That’s no one elses business but their own. There are more important things than someone’s dating history.

I try to keep my life private. That’s because I’ve had people in my life that I lost my trust in. I’m careful what I tell about myself to new people. You could say I have trusting issues. I’m trustworthy myself. If someone tells me a secret I never tell anyone but I can’t trust another to keep my secret. Even if the person says I can trust them, I still don’t believe them. I really need to know the person very well before I can confide in them.
Even if I say it myself, I could date someone in the public eye because I would never tell anyone. Who would I tell anyway, I don’t have any close friends. If I had I would still keep it to myself no matter how happy I would be. I’ll never meet one anyway and if I did, you would never see me in parties or premieres. Those things freak me out. I don’t really like the word, celebrity. It sounds and looks like they are people from another planet. In a way they are but in the end they’re only human who just happens to be famous.

On social media like Facebook I have my privacy restricted so only my followers can read it. Some things you just don’t want everyone to see. But on Twitter it’s all public because if it was restricted, there wouldn’t be a point for me to use it. I wouldn’t get enough of reaction if only my followers would see what I tweet about. Sometimes I get likes and retweets from who doesn’t follow me but there wouldn’t be much if I had it in private. On Twitter I don’t post so-called sensitive issues. Except this blog post. I still won’t post too private things to this blog and even less on social media. Privacy is my right and so is everybody elses. It only depends how you use it online. Tell it all or keep it to yourself. It’s your life and you can do what you like with it.

I feel so exposed

Stockholm in the mist

I joined PayPal the end of last year because I needed the Adobe Creative Cloud programs for my web design education. I had to add my debit card so they could charge me for the rights to use them. I’ve always doubted the security to use a debit or credit cards online. I thought long and hard before I signed in. Things went like it should. But I noticed something on my bank account. Something called GOOGLE *LINE Corp had charged me a lot of times with small sums of euros in one day on Monday (Jan 16). This is exactly what I was worried about that some weird money loss will happen. I feel so exposed and I don’t what I’m gonna do. It’s the weekend and the bank is closed. I tried to find a solution online but I didn’t find a straight answers. There’s nothing in Finnish either. I didn’t have anything of this until I joined PayPal. I don’t even know if that’s the problem and I don’t even know if this thing will keep charging me. It’s not the real Google and I have never bought anything else online with a card than Adobe CC.

I don’t want to be one of those people who looses all of their money because of some scam. Is this even one of those? I’m not gonna wait until that. I don’t even know if I get that money back and how much I lost. It’s such burden to handle problems like this. I don’t want to delete my PayPal account because I really want these Adobe programs for my education. That’s not the problem though. PayPal is supposed to be save. A lot of people are using it for their business. I really hope this GOOGLE *LINE Corp won’t cause anymore problems. You never think you’re the person who need to worry about fraud and things like that. The strange thing about these charges is that they were all done in one day. I don’t know where they got my account number and why it happened in the first place. I never put any account numbers anywhere online. Not even phone numbers. Security is very important to me when it comes to internet. I never expose anything personal like that and no one can fool me to do so.
All I can do is hope because I can’t do anything about this until next week when the bank is open again. That’s the only solution I have to get this thing sorted out. Internet is no help at all. You think you find everything on Google but that’s no entirely true. At least not in this case.

An advice to you all. Never post anything security related online. No passwords or social security numbers. If someone asks your password, never tell. Banks never asked their clients that. There are people who have fallen for scams because they trust other people too much. Anyone can fall for that if they’re not careful.
You should never send money to someone you barely know. They’re called con-artists and there’s a lot of those online. The victims are usually female who fall for someone’s charm. Only a fool would trust a stranger. So don’t be one. Like Kim Wilde once sang ‘Never trust a stranger‘ Being careful is never a bad thing. So stay safe.

Tallenna