How honest can your blog really be?
When I started my blog, it was very casual. I told no one it even existed – not my family, not my close friends.
It was my little secret.
To a degree, it was easier that way. I could use it for the reason I started it – to speak out loud, in a sense. I could write about upbeat stories that made my day – while also share some that were pretty crappy.
It only took a few entries for my blog to become my sanctuary – one that housed its own little psychologist. And under one web address I became both shrink and patient and I could yap all day and I wasn’t getting charged a small fortune in the process.
I would write and immediately feel better knowing that every word I published would be there for the world, and yet no one I knew, to see.
It was liberating.
But then I started publishing work and decided that perhaps this undercover blog thing should be, in fact, uncovered.
And so a new blog name was born, a twitter handle was set up and I started blogging as… me. There was no hiding this time.
What happened next changed my world of blogging as I knew it – I got readers.
Of course that was the whole point of going public – but it didn’t make the surprise of it all any less so.
Some readers I knew well, some I knew kinda well, some I knew casually, others I didn’t know at all.
Watching my stats creep up, slowly but surely, every day, was weird. And the figures didn’t lie – people were actually going out of their way to click on to my page, to read what I had to say.
It was a strange feeling, that.
And throughout the whole process, I wanted to remain true to myself, to write what I believed in, unedited and unscripted. I wanted to be the same person online as I was in person – who that is you might have to decipher through my posts.
The truth of the matter is however, when you are blogging as you - just how honest can you be when people know who you are?
How do you write honestly and openly, without fear of being judged?
How do you write about your life when there are other people in it that might not like what you have to say?
Every so often, I write a post and it stays in drafts. I write it because it needs to be said, but don’t publish because it doesn’t need to be read.
And that bit is hard for me.
Because even though every single word I have written on this blog is honest - I never want to say anything that I will regret later. Once its published – even if you delete it, it can’t be un-read.
But its these raw qualities and lack of care-factor that are sometimes the most endearing of all blogs – its why people love to read them. Sometimes I wish I had less care and more raw.
How do you stay honest on your blog?