Transparent People - Are you one?

"Shall I permit my fellow men to know me as I truly am, or shall I seek instead to remain an enigma, and be seen as someone I am not?”

Before you jump to any immediate conclusions, I am not talking about those people transparent people as being the false people.

I am talking about what Sidney M. Jourard refers to the “Transparent Self”:

“Throughout history...man has chosen the road of concealment rather than “openness,” a route that all too often results in sickness, misunderstanding, and alienation from self. . . . Man can attain health and fullest personal developmeent only insofar as he gaines courage to be himself with others and only when he finds goals that have meaning for him, goals which include the reshaping of society so that it is fit for all to live and grow in."

I was reading this off of a cover of a book I found in a Bargain Books store that was as quiet as a library, looking for some additional resources for my forensic psychology classes when suddenly a lot of my thoughts I had been having over the course of several months came together for me as I read this - and exclaimed a rather loud, “Yes!!” The disruption had people glaring their eyes at me and I slowly added that book to my stack and took it to the counter to pay for my new found resource books.

The book was written in 1971; however, I can’t help but think that, if the book was updated, that he might also affirm the need for blogging that people have been finding themselves doing in this day and age - nearly 25 years later! After all, blogging is simply a medium for one to expose a little bit about themselves. I think that the people that have the greater problems with blogging are the same people who aren’t very revealing about themselves to others - at varying levels. On the other hand, the people who do well in blogging often reveal a lot about themselves. If a a survey were to be taken, I wonder how many folks were to affirm that they feel healthier, even just on the mental level?

I know, speaking for myself, that I have become healthier in many senses and enjoy a greater freedom of myself. It is, as if, a weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders as I blog and receive3 the feedback from others in the blog communities that I post my blogs.

So....

knowing what you do know now:

1. Are you a transparent person?
2. Have you always been? or , is much of it attributed to your blogging experiences?