Warts and All
Kahlil Gibran
I first started writing a diary when I was thirteen years old and I had a crush on my English teacher. I bought a tiny diary which I filled with pages and pages of passion, drama and hormonal angst which is fairly typical of moody teenagers everywhere. Everything was important in those days – my heart would be broken simply if he ignored me or worse, if he criticised my (pretty appalling) girly teenage writing. The crush lasted for several years. The poor bloke, I wonder if he ever knew how many journals I filled writing about him. On the other hand – he was the one who made me realise I wanted to be a writer one day, so I certainly owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
I kept a diary for many years. Many teenage girls keep them, mainly as somewhere that they can let off steam in private, a therapy to work through private thoughts that cannot be shared anywhere else. “Dear Diary...” is a way of expressing “the real you” that you cannot show your Mum or Dad. Diaries are secret things and the whole point of them is that you should always tell the truth. They must be as explicit as possible – how else can you purge what you really feel unless you are totally honest with yourself? Your diary is your soul. It is who you are.
Many moons ago we were having some pretty extensive building work done on our house and I was horrified to find that one of our building contractors (who had a crush on me) had gone through my private hidden belongings and had helped himself to a volume-or-three of my diaries. I only found out when his mates started quoting me the gory details of my (at the time, rather adventurous) sex life. To say I was horrified, shocked and appalled would be the understatement of the decade. I stopped writing a diary on that very day and I’ve never kept once since. Nowadays of course, I blog instead, albeit not to the same intimate and explicit levels (which is a relief all round, I’m sure.) After that episode I actually feel more comfortable sharing my life on a public forum with a bunch of people I have never met than I do actually keeping my thoughts in a locked (but physical and therefore covetable) journal.
Unlike some bloggers, I really try very hard not to have a blogging persona. It is important to me to be myself here as much as possible. What you see is what you get. I write pretty much the way I used to in my diaries, minus the intimate stuff. The trouble is with bloggie personas, if you play an online role that isn’t really “you” then when you eventually meet your bloggie friends in person, they then find that they don’t really know you at all, and then you get found out. Like my diaries, I always feel that it is important to tell it like it is, warts and all, and I am invariably drawn to bloggers who do the same (and you all know who you are.)
Blogging does no good unless you are brutally honest about yourself. It is important to tell the truth, for the sake of yourself and your readers. If you conceal your real life and your thoughts, if you invent an online persona of who you would like to be, if you exaggerate and fabricate your life, then you are lying to yourself and your readers. In such cases your blog will ultimately fail because it will not be a true record of who you are and how you feel. It will not be your sanctuary, your therapy – instead it will be a fraud to the highest possible degree.
After four years of blogging, if I have any advice to offer potential bloggers, it is this:
Assume all your secrets will be found out one day. Always write with this in mind. And tell the truth. Always. No exceptions.
I guess I learned that lesson the hard way.












