Writing, especially for experience-based blogs or cases where life experiences get shared, draws upon the actual life-lived of the author. This truth also extends to other creative expression like acting, music, and art. If you date or are in the life of an artist, a musician, a TV personality, a comedian, or a writer then there’s a good chance you might have to discuss boundaries about what aspects or information about your life you consent to having included or revealed in a creative piece. When the goal of the creator is to express something that is emotional or artistic to themselves, then them sharing relevant-and-true details increases the potential exposure for those around them. For private people in that disclosure blast radius, this might not be a fit.
Who Owns the Details of Experience?
When someone is sharing about events they actually experienced, how much of the tangential or peripheral details of others are theirs to tell?
One position is that anything they experienced, learned, heard about, saw is fair game, perhaps even extending into things imagined; the goal of the creator is to create. Another position is that anything that could be considered public to some number of neutral third parties would be fair game. Another one would be that any information that was shared in direct communication, firsthand or secondhand, as part of life, would be considered off-the-record and that these should not figure into what gets shared in an author’s words.
This consideration is both a matter of experience and a matter of privacy. Whose story is whose? How much gets to be shared? How restricted will the creator be in what they want to create? What are the priorities of the creator? How much of this potentially private information would need to be shared for a creator to make their point? How important is it for the author to even make a public point that requires stepping into private information they have come across through various means? What social price is the creator willing to pay if this private information gets shared without clearing it advance with someone impacted?
As a creator, you have to choose the level of openness from which you create, and the depths to which you are willing to share. You have to consider if that matches the comfort level of people in your life, and then you have to make decisions about what you put out into the world. To step into grey areas, or assume full freedom, invites a social cost, and the potential reduction of trust and/or friendships in your life.
In addition to creative pursuits, all of these considerations also apply to social media sharing. We might feel that whatever enters our world is our story to tell, but to broadcast the realities of others may be to invite unintended social consequences. Choose wisely.
An Example Scenario
Here’s a hypothetical situation: Imagine that your partner’s uncle unexpectedly shows up in town. She hasn’t seen him in years and it’s very important for her to have dinner with him. This would involve canceling a date that you’ve had on the calendar for a long time, and you are having an emotional reaction to this. If you want to reference this in your tale there are several ways you could paint the scenario.
The first is that you could say that your partner’s uncle came into town and they had dinner; your plans got canceled and you felt sad. In addition to your own feelings, this approach reveals some level of information about both your partner and about her uncle.
The next way would be to say that someone important came into town, with the same effect upon you. This still reveals information about your partner but fully removes disclosure about the uncle from the scenario.
You could simply say that something important came up, and your joint plans were impacted. This is a lot more vague. It indicates that your partner had to make what was probably a difficult choice but doesn’t reveal any more information about what this choice might have been. It still pulls your partner into your revelation, but in a different way. Perhaps one way is more acceptable than the other, and it’s up to the two of you to come to that understanding.
Finally, you could skip the details completely and say something like “plans I had this evening we’re unfortunately canceled due to something else important that came up last minute”. That sounds dry and clinical but still conveys some aspect of your meaning. It doesn’t reveal any information about your partner nor about their uncle. This way has the most privacy considerations but is also the least satisfying from an emotionally-impactful perspective. From a journaling perspective it falls flat, but journals are different form of writing and not usually intended for public consumption.
Some of these approaches make for more engaging writing than others, but the words we choose matter. The words we choose may have a cost.
What this Means to Me
As a creator I am going to have to thread this needle, respecting the people I have in my life, their varying desires for privacy, and while still trying to create something engaging. And yes, you can accurately infer that this topic arose because of my already having to navigate this very topic.
In that particular case I fully removed a post I had written. I had initially written something and in it had shared details of a personal struggle I was facing. The details mattered to my journey but in painting that picture I drew upon details from the lives of at least two other people whose lives overlapped mine. After consulting one of them and receiving feedback, I edited the piece and removed most of these details.
After the edit, I felt my meaning and message were still there, but their opinion was that too many details were still shared. I considered how else I could modify that piece and then opted to simply remove it, determining that this piece would not sufficiently exist absent those details. A post of some kind would have remained, even one with potential impact, but magnitude of certain aspects of my words, and my own personal meaning, felt lost with the changes I would have had to have made. With a little sadness, but also with responsibility and peace, I took it down.
Since that post-removal took place, I have proactively sought to minimize details from the lives of others in my words. Anything I have personally experienced may be included, however personal details and truths told to me by people around me, even if they impacted my own life in meaningful ways… those step into this awkward disclosure zone. Instead of potentially having to rework a piece of writing again, perhaps to the point of dissatisfaction, I have chosen to write with the intention of not oversharing from the lives of others. If I decide that I can express my meaning to my satisfaction with reduced disclosure, I will. Anything that goes beyond this level of sharing will be subject to review from anyone involved, prior to publication. People in my life are more important to me than accidentally oversharing via my writing.
Addendum
The above applies to relationships and individuals that engage me with a level of respect, or with forward social motion. We are in this together, building friendships or relationships in life together, and I will honor and support that intention. If, however, someone violates me, or maliciously hurts someone I care about, or they step into nefarious or shady territory, I do not feel bound by what I have shared above.
Be a good person 🙂