White Blossoms

I’ve not posted these early spring images because I had nothing to write with them. Today I realised I could simply share a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time that’s unrelated to any photo series I might complete. It’s about privacy in the public eye.

I’ve been blogging for over ten years. When I first started nobody knew who I was. I didn’t have to care about any mistakes or embarrassing moments being publicly visible. My blog was a nice project just for me to develop a range of skills. At first, it was just me having fun. After a while, people began to know who I was. This is much more than a follower count or how many people comment on a social media post. I would define it as people in public telling me they knew me, or people I knew telling me people they knew who were outside of my circle read my posts and talked about what I shared. Eventually, it would get stranger, like a treasured aunt that would occasionally be in my posts had someone meet her at an event and tell her all the things she knew about her. My aunt was really unsettled and I felt terrible that posts I had made years earlier had made her visible and known in a way she had never asked for. I began asking people’s permission before mentioning them or sharing their pictures on my blog and the platforms I use.

I have had some pretty uncomfortable incidents because of that visibility too. People have sent me screenshots of social media thread pile-ons by people I’ve never met, heavily criticizing screenshots of my stories. I remember one commenter, a girl I had spoken to once for about two minutes when she served me in a shop, used that brief encounter to self-identify as enough of an expert on me to declare I had ‘terf‘ and ‘swerf‘ vibes. How she landed at that from me asking if the store offered non-gendered school equipment for kids puzzled me for a while. I later understood it didn’t matter. Once you become visible, there is a currency in people discussing their opinion of you as a way of defining themselves, in the same way that some people hate a certain book or tv show because it makes them look unique.

It does require thick skin to have things like that happen, but I’m still learning to navigate some of the more sinister things that have come with being so visible (including several protective orders and court visits for stalking). Those require some really important things: self-respect and boundaries.

Never in a million years would I have thought that my blog and creative work would be as visible as they are and the thing about being visible is that it gives people access to you. Some years ago I started doing some personal growth work on vulnerability which was incredibly beneficial. Vulnerability is defined by Brene Brown as ‘showing up and being seen.’ I initially started applying this as showing both the pretty and not-pretty parts of my life, thinking that perhaps that’s why people would pile on and criticize from the sidelines; they couldn’t see me or my life properly. I agonised over how to counter that supposedly evil word: ‘curated’. I didn’t show everything, because not everything is mine alone to share, but I did chat openly about the seemingly hard-to-resolve struggles of having a chronic illness and the process towards diagnosis. I also sometimes chatted about grief. While it was wonderful to connect with people about these topics and get international media for some serious and meaningful things like awareness around Amniotic Fluid Embolisms, there was a real-world cost. People would manoeuvre their way into my life because proximity to me would become social collateral. For example, using me so that they could have great photography, signing me up for surprise media spots without telling me (a coffee date turns out to be a surprise filming of a TV commercial), strengthening their brand by association with me, using me to soft-sell their products, telling people they knew that I would use my audiences to promote their businesses before asking me about it so that it would come across as rude or snobbish if I did not feel comfortable doing it.

Some would use the information I had shared publicly to manipulate me to get this access, trying to put me in a position of needing to be rescued or healed or helped so they could swoop in as a saviour. Some would pretend to have the same interests as me when they were actually just absorbing me until I realised they were The Talented Mr Ripley. Some even undermined my confidence in my skills in order to position themselves as mentors and teachers so they could exploit me. There have been many points of retrospection where I have had to try and figure out how a toxic friendship started, what I could have identified to stop it from happening sooner and how to set up boundaries without compromising vulnerability. With that brutal risk for being candid on my platforms, I had to take stock and really review how to navigate being so visible. Particularly when I love people. I love sharing and collaborating and meeting online friends. How do you filter out the toxic outliers?

To start, why did I think I needed to be open and give people access to me in order to be deserving of basic respect in the first place? That was the crux of it. I thought I needed to do something extra for people to actually ‘see’ me as more than just an influencer or a (mildly) famous person. I didn’t. Anything they thought of me was always going to be the measurement of them.

Does that mean not being vulnerable? No. To me, vulnerability is about honesty and being accountable for being honest with yourself. I’ve always had firm rules on my blog where I don’t photoshop myself to be skinny or cellulite-free. I’m honest about my skin (see if you can spot the cold sore in these pics). I don’t project myself as something I’m not.

I had been haunted by online commentary as well as quite critical conversations with friends that curation is not honesty. That only choosing good photos of yourself is not honest, so gosh I’d better put in a few that aren’t flattering. That only showing the fun places you go and not the mess of your bathroom counter is pretending to be something you’re not. Time has passed now and I see things very differently.

Curation is not a mask, it is a boundary.

Yes, some people do edit their photos and use curation as a mask. Yes, some people try and project a perfect life to make themselves feel like they have worth. Importantly though,

if you think that someone else is portraying themselves to be better than they are, that says something about you and what you feel about your own worth. 

You absolutely cannot know from the outside of a person’s life, what moments are happening between those photographs being taken, between the micro-updates you get on TikTok or the minutes of their voice you hear on a Podcast. Behind those snippets you see, are a million things that you have no right to know. That you have absolutely no business knowing. We do not deserve access to people or their private lives simply because they are visible. A visible person is not being deceitful by curating an online presence that excludes struggles with mental health, cancer, sexuality, chronic illness, infertility and conception, homelessness, domestic violence, sexual assault or more.

A visible person does not need to bleed for us in order to be deserving of basic respect and dignity, in order for us to know that they can bleed.

Sometimes a famous person won’t speak on an issue because it’s too close to home, not because they don’t care. For example, people being critical of women not speaking up in the #MeToo movement, instead of reading between the lines and recognising that being able to speak about traumas is such a rare gift for victims. Some people with a platform can’t speak because the trauma is lived for them.

The same standards we hold ourselves to amongst our friends, family, coworkers and community are necessary when interacting with people online. The people we have parasocial relationships with are no exception to this. I would expand this to say that particularly in a parasocial relationship where you are the sole contributor, you are the sole person responsible for how you feel about that person. There is necessary accountability that needs to be explored (particularly when the parasocial relationship is one that wishes harm such as hating a celebrity or public figure because it feels nice when you do it).

Knowing that doing inner work like that is rare means that anyone living in the public eye has to live with a significant amount of unfair attention. When you are someone who is visible, you are absolutely going to be occasional dinner table conversation. There will be people who will validate themselves as an expert about you because they sat on a train with you one time and they will use it to swear to people that you’re actually a lizard, and they would know.

For women, this is always amplified and will include age-old tropes like you being called a liar, a snake, a narcissist, a slut, an attention whore, someone who slept their way to whatever success they achieved, only successful for being pretty, a scarlet letter, a diversity hire, asking for it (‘it’ includes any form of negative attention or opinion), actually shit at their known expertise and skill and just famous for it because it’s a novelty to have a woman, particularly a feminine or well-groomed woman, cosplaying in a role men naturally dominate or excel at. Any excuse that puts the blame on her for triggering whatever abuse will come her way.

Curation is a boundary so they can keep to themselves whatever they do not want in the mouth of the lizard conspiracy guy on the bus. It means the visible person has a defined sense of their self-worth that extends to understanding the worth of access to themselves. For women, it is often a safe haven of self-preservation.

Chances are you have followed me for some time so you are wondering why this post is coming out now. The reason is multifaceted.

It’s part of the reason I’ve blogged rarely and inconsistently for over 18 months. Part of. I’ve been mulling over many of the questions in here and exploring and firming up my understanding of my boundaries. There is also a big life-event reason that I probably won’t speak about for 6 months or so, as it is still unfolding and I want plenty of time to process it by the time I do share.

My well-earned self-worth understands the necessity of talking about it and I want to balance that against some really important boundaries such as: only sharing my own story, only sharing that which I’m willing to have discussed at dinner tables and by people who mean harm. Without writing this post first, I’d have to put it in there too which would make the whole thing much too long. It is important for me to clearly outline the boundaries here as an accountability tool for down the track, for me and the people who may end up interacting with me.

So here are the important takeaways from this post:

I may withhold what I share on my platforms if it would also share other people’s private stories.

I will do my best to not share what I am absolutely unwilling to have discussed by strangers. Be assured there is much more to any personal story I write up.

If I share something delicate or serious, it has been done with a great amount of courage, knowing people I do not know will not treat it with dignity.

I am not a lizard.

I am visible enough to have to take precautions to protect myself and to protect my privacy.

Now the official business is out of the way, these photos are from a sweet little play date with a darling friend of mine (Laura) that I’ve moved nearby to. Having better access to her company is a gift at an important time. I think it is easy to see from her framing that she is a talented artist. We took these shots early in spring.

The dress is a vintage one I got from a clothing store I worked in as a teenager. It doesn’t currently fit, due to some health issues, so I’m wearing it unzipped at the back from the waist up. I did get some shots where this was visible but I don’t think I ended up including any in the final photos.

We used a different lens to usual and I’ve got to tell you, I’m stunned at how much better they look than my usual lens. Time to put this lens back in regular use, I feel.

– L