Second, I like to think that any lies told on the blog have been caused by faulty memory. Other than the Obfuscation game, I have never consciously written an entry that I knew to be false. Of course, you see I qualify my statement. Consciously, I say, so that if anyone were to ever go back these five+ years of blogging and found a lie I could hide behind something.

My lies, if I can call them that, are lies of omission. There are plenty of things I could share but that I choose not to because they are too private, too shameful, too pitiful to put into words that others can see. When I chose to not write about my weight, I felt that was a lie because I felt I wasn’t giving people the full picture (no pun intended).

I’ve had a couple of discussions with other bloggers about how my own writing suffers from the inability to embellish. Sure, I exaggerate but that’s so obvious that no one could possibly be confused by that (hopefully). But there are times when I experience something that I’d like to blog about but my telling is so tedious, so long-winded (like this comment) that in the end I choose to not even try. Others tell me I should fudge here and there, to make the story readable. But I don’t feel comfortable doing that.

What are we accountable for I guess is the question. If I choose to not write about the fact that I’ve been overweight my whole life, and make no mention at all of my physical self, am I somehow misleading people? If they envision someone thinner, have I played an active part in a lie? How much of ourselves do we owe to others? I try to make the writing interesting or engaging (try being the operative word) but in the end I’m mostly writing for myself and beause of that, I want to be as honest as I possibly can be on a public forum because I want to be able to look back on these words and remember who I used to be, what I used to think, how I used to act. What others take from it, well, one can only guess.