Saturday 9 May 2020

All the things we do not write

Several years ago, when I first started this blog, I had no real idea what it would become.

I started writing it when I was setting off on an exciting adventure to a completely different culture, and some of my friends and family had expressed interest in following the journey. At first, then, it was intended simply as a space to record and share what life looked like in the Philippines.

It quickly became apparent it could never really just be that. It was never going to be just objective observations, if such a thing even exists: it was always going to be shaped by the lenses through which I was watching the world. Reflecting on that process, on what those lenses were, how they effected and distorted the world I saw through them, quickly became an important part of how I used this space.

I also knew, when I began, that I had never been any good at diary writing. I recalled occasional phases of wanting to write a diary, to keep a record, to be able to look back and go 'oh yeah, that'; but I had never kept it up for long. I wasn't at all convinced I'd manage to motivate myself to keep blogging throughout my time in the Philippines, let alone that I'd still be fairly consistently putting stuff up here nearly nine years later. I am really pleased that I have.

I really value this space, but there have always been challenges to it too. Way back when, in a different context, I wrote another post touching on some of them.

This is my diary, the place I explore the realities of my life, but there have always been things that have never been written here. There always will be. There have always been reflections which have been measured against how appropriate it is to share them more widely, without knowing who might read it. The public nature of this space has been a great motivator: to write, to reflect, to process, to record. But it has its limitations too.

This has always been a space for sharing MY story, and my reflections on it ... but to quote a cliche, no-one is an island, and my story is never just my story. Each of our stories is always an interplay between our own life, and the lives of others. Whatever I might want to share of my story, I also have to be fair to what they might, or might not want me to share of theirs. I am deeply aware that sharing the ways the joys of life intermingle with others is often easier than the stories of pain and struggle, and maybe part of this post is about reflecting on how to ensure that this is in some way a fair record, even if it is,by its nature, an incomplete one.

It is part of the beauty and richness of my life that it is entwined in complex and intricate ways with the lives of so many others. Clearly, then, parts of their stories are inevitably shared here too; but their agency, or lack of agency, in what I write always has to be taken into account too. Because this blog is also not only my story, but it is very much my version of my story. It is and always has been, very deliberately not objective. It is not even attempting to be, and I hope there is no pretence that it is.

There are those stories which are very deeply and definitely 'my stories' but which are intricately intertwined with those of others in ways in which it makes it impossible to tell the one without the other: an other I might or might not feel I have the right or the capacity to tell. There are also those stories which are part of mine only by virtue of them being entrusted to me and, for all the ways they effect me, may or may not therefore be mine to tell at all.

Integrity is deeply important to me, and I have always wanted this to be as authentic as possible a record and reflection of who I am. I hope that it is. I hope the fact that, out of respect for those around me, it only tells a part of the story, never detracts from the desire for it to be a genuine record. I guess this post is my reminder to myself, and to you, that it can aspire to be that, even in the midst of all the things that are left unsaid.

This is blog post number 300. 
If you've followed from the beginning, that's a whole lot of words you've read. 
If you've followed at all, thank you for sharing the journey!
It continues ...

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