Wednesday. Fandango’s Provocative Question once again. This week he asks:
Are you the same person on your blog as you are in real life? Do you like yourself more in the virtual world than you do in the real world?
Okay, in short, yes, I am the same person.
It’s funny, though, because I can empathise with the guy in Fandango’s preamble. When I started doing my weekly phone calls to some seniors, I could not help but wonder: you’re talking to somebody every week. Surely there’ll come a time when there’s nothing left to talk about? After all, one of the reasons I can volunteer is because I’m not at work. I’m disabled, my mobility is restricted. So in terms of doing stuff, I have a lot less to talk about than I did a few years ago. And many of my clients are the same. Some are housebound (permanently), so do even less than me.
So I posed this question to the charity manager. Just invent something, they said. And it is true – we were only speaking on the end of the phone, so I could tell them whatever I want. What did you do last week? I ejected from my fighter jet at 30,000 feet, sailed down all that way in my parachute into shark-infested waters, then swan 10 miles to safety. Anything, whatever …
[As it is, my last week, I walked up the lane and went out to the supermarket!]
And actually, if I’d have wanted to invent a James Bond persona, what would be the harm? But I didn’t – I can just about scrape enough things together (usually) to hold a conversation for fifteen minutes or so.
But I can see what Fandango’s buddy was saying – there is scope when we blog to present ourselves as so much more than we actually are.
But, for all I say I don’t embellish myself, you guys only see what I want you to see of me. There’s a definite window there, and not everything is transparent. I doubt it is with any of us – we don’t share all the rows with our partner, say, or times when we acted like a complete idiot (my wife assures me that these two scenarios are one and the same 🙂). I know people on here who will write as part of a post that they can sometimes be a total asshole, and I think that surely, it can’t be true, because these people seem so nice. But then, it is true for me, so why would it not be true for them too?
The legal phrase springs to mind: the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Which of us could claim that this phrase describes what we blog?