One thing that occasionally concerns me is that it might sometimes seem like I just make things up for this blog. There were one or two anecdotes which I almost didn’t write, because I was worried that they would just seem like they were made up and the blog would lose some of its integrity. One of these was the story about when I got threatened with a knife, another was the time I accidentally wandered into the woman’s changing room at the local pool without realising (to name two examples off the top of my head.) But of course, its silly not to write about things like that, because they did happen and the whole idea of this blog is to write about things that happen to me – I just can’t help but be a little concerned because anybody can claim that anything happened to them.
Honesty in blogging is something which I take very seriously and I’d never write anything on this blog which I didn’t believe to be 100% true. But it’s a concept I sometimes grapple with; for example, I wrote a blog post about a time when I was in school and one of my teachers was absolutely terrible towards me. I feel like I wrote that post fairly and honestly, but, as with any dispute, the other person involved could probably write a version of those events in which I am the bad person – I just have to be as fair and objective as I can when it comes to things like that, but as they say, all writing has some degree of bias, even if only small. A perfect example of my own bias is that I wrote once about a time that somebody tried to violently intimidate me, but actually forgot that I’d gotten quite angry afterward, so I had to add a clarifying note to the bottom of that post.
Memory is another issue too: I started writing this blog in 2011, but there were things that had happened to me before 2011 which I thought were interesting and so deserved to be written down – this meant I’ve sometimes written anecdotes years after they actually happened. One example is the story of the time a friend of mine and I witnesses a parent abusing their child and tried to intervene – I remember what happened, but how much had my memory been affected by the passing of time when I wrote that? I like to think I remember a good amount, but I probably remember less than I think.
So basically, the issue of honesty in blogging is something I’m always conscious of. I try as hard as I can to ensure that these blog posts are as accurate and honest as possible, but I suppose there’s always going to be a degree of error. Outside of this blog, I have to write all kinds of marketing stuff which I don’t honestly believe, but at least here I can create my own space for honest reflection.
