It’s one thing to write in one’s journals for a private audience of one. But when the Whole Wide World could read one’s utterings, that thought stops me in my tracks and I take a moment to decide whether I should write what’s REALLY on my mind.

I lift my hat off to those people who have no such pauses and just motor on, daring to speak their truth in the public domain. A question though. Is not writing what you’d really like to say, a lie? Would guaranteed anonymity lead to more truths? Au contraire, just like how when you meet someone for the first time, you may not tell them EVERY last thing that’s on your mind, so too could the choice of blog content be explained. So maybe one day I might just put it out there.

For me, it’s a vulnerability issue. I’ve lived most of my life under the radar. No one except my friends and a few others knew me at High School. I didn’t do sports. I wasn’t on the Student’s Council and perhaps because of those factors, I was not a Prefect.

But it’s interesting though. With the old dot com blog, when I had access to it and would read the archives, I’d sit there thinking “you wrote THAT Miss Foot?” From what I recall, in the early years, no one knew who I was in the real world. So with the initial blog, I was like a dog which had been let out of its pen. Anything which entered my thoughts when I signed in to the blog, would get published. Unlike now, where I write the drafts then read them over, I hardly read back what I wrote before I hit the Publish button. Again, it was the vulnerability factor…but on the other side of the coin. I thought that with anonymity, I would be shielded.

So what is the concern really Miss Foot? Well, one thing is that the thoughts come in to my mind in response to stimuli, which would include interactions with people. If I take a point discussed during an interaction and built a blog post around it, especially if my opinion was very different to the other person’s, would they feel that I was pointing fingers at them? [Now Miss Foot, you’re assuming that you are at the top of everyone else’s radar. How wrong a thought! They have their own lives containing more serious issues to be concerned about.] I believe at this point, some readers would ‘steups’ or ‘kiss dem teeth’.

Well this is a part of saying what’s on my mind. After all, isn’t that why Weblogs were invented?