Love from, Florence Grace

Choosing to share your life on the internet is a big  decision. When I started blogging, I had to have a think about whether I'd have blogging profiles on social media to differentiate from my personal life and my 'professional' life, or whether I'd merge the two together. Initially, I separated the two, but it didn't take long for me to find that I was posting almost identical content on both profiles, often mixing the two up and decided to just have one set of profiles. I'm what most people would call an over sharer. Earlier on I tweeted "I feel like the fact I just found a crisp packet sandwiched between my planner pages sums up how my life is going right now". Pointless, right? I share photo's of everything- if I'm out for cocktails, buying things I can't afford, celebrating an occasion or just having a games night with Alec, BJ and Carda, you'll know about it. I enjoy documenting my life and knowing that at any given point, I can...

You know what really annoys me?  People concerning themselves with my business.  Now, as a blogger/writer etc. I am totally aware that I leave my life open to speculation from the public, both from people I do and don't know. I have completely open social media sites in order to be able to instantly connect with people and to promote my work- I would not be able to do this with private accounts- and so people from all over the world can, and do, see everything. Selfies, drunken nights out, achievements, family days, my cats, new purchases, just my every day life. And of course, it leaves people able to comment on it all.  There are a few comments that creep up- usually indirectly- about the things that I post. Who does she think she is, her boobs are saggy, you still look fat, stop thinking you're better than anyone else, how boring to go out every weekend... the list goes on. Now thankfully, after undergoing online abuse such as this for going on...

"Bitch" "Whore" "Pathetic" "Attention seeker" "Man hater" "Embarrassing"  Don't these words make your skin crawl? When you imagine somebody calling you pathetic? When you picture someone standing right in front of you, looking you in the eye's and calling you a whore? Don't worry. That's not something I've ever had to deal with. Instead, I dealt with having these words, plus many more, flung at me almost every day for the vast majority of my teenage life via the "safe" platforms of social media. I've been named and shamed for things I haven't even done, had screenshots of my statuses, blog posts and comments shared on Twitter with hundreds of people making nasty comments. I've had subtweets about me, almost every day. The worst part is, about 40% of these people were people I called friends. People I spoke to and hung out with regularly. Yet what kind of "frien...