Self taught Kate has an interesting post up about owning up to truths about yourself on your blog, and making things look or seem other than as they are. (Her example is better, but there are also people who make their lives seem worse. Over time, I have done both, either intentionally or not.)
If you are like me, you read other people’s websites, the websites of people who are so creative and talented, and when they talk about sadness or anger or–if they are actually honest enough to admit to it–being bitchy or rude or annoying, you don’t really “believe” it. It does not seem possible that people who are so far away could possibly get angry or experience negative emotions. Back in the days when I first started this whole weblogging thing (shockingly, this is now seven years ago, if you count the free homepage sites I used to use before I bought a domain name!), I used to read the websites of creative women and I thought that their lives were perfect. I thought they were perfect. I put them on pedestals, as models for what I wanted.
Now, so many years later, after meeting so many and emailing so many and seeing that their lives are just as f*cked up in all the right ways as my life is, I see the layers. I also see how dangerous it can be to believe in the image some portray–I am thinking of one website in particular, someone I was once friends with and am no longer associated with, someone who puts a very pretty picture of their life on the web when the reality is anything but. The experience of that online/IRL relationship did a lot to change my view that the life described on the website is necessarily the real thing.
Sometimes I think I’d like more history up, and consider putting all my usenet and opendiary writings on here, in the archives. (I do not intend to do this, but I have considered it more than once.) This would be for me, because I can’t imagine a whole lot of people suddenly delving into the 4+ year old writings I wrote. I guess it would also be for random googlers.
That’s not the point.
The thing is, I tend to think of people’s blogs as describing the whole of their lives, when I know this isn’t true. But I never know what’s left out, obviously, and because I can’t fill it in, I assume it’s not there, and often I don’t even know what I’m assuming isn’t there. When Jo(e) did her answers to regularly asked questions, I realised that I had thought, in the back of my mind, that she and Mr. Jo(e) had not much of a relationship (other than the sex she talks about all the time) because she doesn’t talk about him. I have decided that most bloggers have no friends, because most bloggers never talk about their friends on their blogs, so it surprises me when people talk about friends. I don’t really think I’m right — I leave my friends off my blog, too — and yet, here I am, making these assumptions.
They are a lot of them boring assumptions. The assumptions I make about people’s personalities (better-founded, but still, inaccurate) are not so boring. And not so innocuous, either. I forget sometimes that this is text, not reality, it’s the story of your reality, the story of your life. I use it as a way to complain about things, mostly, recently, and also a way to make sense of my life, to be able to see things and patterns that I can only recognise through narrative.
But this narrative, of course, turns it into a fiction, or a fictionish: truthy, not truth.
I make decisions about how to portray myself and my actions: show up better, show up worse, try both at once. Not talk about them at all (which makes my understanding problematic, and also reorganises my own story, blogging being, in a way, a way of making things real). I wonder often how I come across. Would I read my blog? Would I like me?
This is an issue I have blogged about and thought about before. I come across happier or sadder than I am. Friendlier or more anti-social. Saner or — well, hard to be less sane than I am and still function in society. (See? I am taking on a persona. Is this persona me? Some days.) I don’t try to lie; I do try to misdirect, sometimes. But I lie anyhow, and my misdirections sometimes are good pointers to the truth.