Knowing me, understanding you

Getting out of my head and seeing it like it is

I’ve ummed and aaahed a great deal about whether attaching my name to something in the public domain that paints a less than perfect picture of myself and what goes on inside my meat suit is a good idea or not. My professional (and a significant amount of my personal) life is deeply enmeshed in the perceived value of what I digest and share online; be it my professional presence and the quality of the work I let loose into the wild, or the image of myself and my life that I’ve crafted and want my nearest and dearest to see. When connected to hundreds, if not thousands, of people the idea of sharing something “personal” becomes a slightly farcical and sometimes outright terrifying notion.

Bouts of teenage narcissism, self-indulgence and attention seeking aside, the duplicitous nature of the web, where everything and everyone is available but often not what they seem, I strive to be careful to put forward the best parts of me, whilst eliminating the less desirable bits by way of omission. There is something inherently comforting in that. I can cherry pick pieces of my life that put me across as being more exciting, funnier and more insightful than I am day to day — Pete 2.0. I can be pretty much who I want to be, or perhaps who I “think” I should be.

Recently this way of thinking has left me at a loose end. My inboxes and news feeds are crammed full of “perfect people”. Everyone is a model — their profile pictures carefully chosen and edited so that sometimes I don’t even recognise the person when I see them in the big bad real world. The minutiae of peoples’ lives have been dissected, subtly tweaked and regurgitated online in such a way that they receive the greatest amount of attention and approval; regardless of how closely the new truth resembles what actually happened. I am guilty of this as much as the next person and honestly, I’m bored of it. I know some truly wonderful human beings offline and on, but as entertained and amused as I am by what I see and read, I am left with the sense that I am living in a dream world and I don’t really know anyone or what’s really going on.

The aim of this blog isn’t to redress this balance; it is simply somewhere where I hope to get out the habit of writing something to inflate my online persona’s ego and instead share something more honest, more raw and more me.