Last week in Denver I had to grovel for credentials. Not regular Pepsi Center credentials or floor passes so that I could see right up Beau Biden's nose, but for Big Tent credentials. Basically I had to promise my first born to someone in order to sit in a giant outdoor tent, kept warm by the sweaty heat off of people's bodies and MacBooks. I had to beg to be with my fellow geeks. Fist bumps for twittering through Bill Clinton's 20 minute standing ovation.

There is a little hyperbole there. Because it wasn't exactly groveling. More like, I casually sauntered up to a former coworker who I knew would have credentials to that big nerdy tent in the sky. I tapped him on the shoulder and leaned back on my heels, took a deep breath and then sputtered out something that sounded like "I need big tent credentials because I'm a blogger". But it was all one long word said in a whisper because what if someone heard me?? I was expecting judgment from someone whose career is based on grassroots Internet organizing. I was expecting The Look that I've been on the receiving end of. You know that look. The one that says "Blog? What the hell is a blog?" and then the person compares your very meticulous entries on poop or drinking or TSA to their MySpace page. When I told him that I wrote for BlogHer and started this lengthy explanation of what BlogHer is and how it operates and stopped just short of saying "we're kind of a big deal" when he said "Wow, BlogHer??!!" and did some tapping on his blackberry and lo I had a Big Tent credential. Fin.

It's not a secret that I have a blog. At first it was though, even back when I had my full name as the URL, I was all hush hush about it. And even when my name - my FULL NAME - in the Washington Post Express and Daily Kos and Wonkette, I would still repeat a mantra that NO ONE knew. Because NO ONE in Washington, DC reads anything. And then I moved to a town of like 16 people and my new coworkers discovered The Google and the roof off of my happy little wonderland of obliviousness was blown the hell off. And that was when I became a little tamer in my choice of words and subject matter. That was when I decided to focus on the most inane things in my life and make them interesting. And when there was something right at the tippy top of my head that was waiting to bust out and run free in order to release the pressure of having to hold it in? Well I wrote it out in the most mysterious, hypothetical, way possible.

And then I realized that my bosses didn't care and the people at my job would find a new flavor of the month to gawk at and when I mentioned it to my bosses in an offhand way, they shrugged and said "oh, that's funny" and went back to discussing the weather. Let's just say I got lucky and leave it at that.

Let's also so that when it comes to blogging and my real/work life; I am a walking contradiction. I am proud of it and sometimes it helps to have some sort of Internet expertise under my belt but at other times I do NOT want to speak of it. It's this thing that is public yet private. And the fear of how others - especially in the work world - will react has gone from one extreme to the other. Some are fine with it and others just aren't. But it's that perpetual fear of the reaction from someone else that keeps me from shouting from the rooftops that I can use HTML and that people read on my BLAWG that I went to Denver and I've spent the better part of a week processing my experience there. Mir said it best though:

I don’t just trot it out to people for the same reason that I don’t
open a conversation with “Hi, I’ve been divorced for over five years
and it’s still astounding to me how much trauma shrapnel from that
event is littered around the landscape of my life.” It’s part of me,
and it matters—deeply—but it’s too private to just hold up as an
introductory social parry. I can’t do it.

It's private and yet it's not. And yet I've reluctantly allowed it to enter into my work life but on my terms and in return I'm also learning to come out of the blogging closet when asked to do so by my peers and make the Internet and what we do here not have such a stigma attached to it. I'm finding that when it comes down to it, it's a learning process for all. For us, as bloggers to let people know that blogging isn't a necessarily weird or bad or unproductive thing and for others to understand that we aren't just a bunch of nerds who drool on our Macbooks while spouting off on our keyboards. We have thoughts and ideas, like everyone else, damn it. And I for one, will learn to be a little prouder of what I do.

Naked Jen also was pushed out of the blogging closet at work. And Carly Ann is unfortunately one of the ones who did not get so lucky when her boss found out about her blog.

Heather B. rarely writes about work on her blog, No Pasa Nada. Unless it has to do with Barack Obama. And then it's all work, all the time.