Promises to my reader

For the most-part I am treating this blog as a diary for several reasons. I want the things I put on the page to be an honest representation of myself and my experiences at the time of writing. I don't want to be creating things out of a pressure to fill some quota or catch specific attention and I know myself so I know that is a pressure I am susceptible to. That said, I am making these posts public and as such I recognize that the audience, be that just me or even if someone finds these writings a decade from now, is part of the greater conversation I am having, and so, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that directly and to make a few promises with that in mind.

I value my fallibility

I am not a perfect person. I am, and always will be, growing and changing. Some of that growth and change is deliberate and chosen as I refine myself and my morals. Some of that growth is unpredictable and caused by my experiences and interactions with the world around me. I am going to mess up. That might be small things like using language that I didn't realize was hurtful or outdated. It might be a much larger harm be that a physical injury I cause or psychological damage. I do my best to live my life in a way that reduces my harm, but I believe it is irresponsible for me to not understand that I certainly have already caused some harms and I will certainly cause others.

In the rope scene we have seen a great deal of harm caused because of so called pedestal culture. I can do two things to fight pedestal culture. One is that I internally can do the work to try and not put other people I see online or as community leaders on a pedestal. The other is that I can attempt to present my own online presence in as fallible and human a way as possible. It is easy to want to hide my mistakes from the public eye and easy to want to post about my successes, but doing that perpetuates pedestal culture, and so I promise to leave my mistakes where they can be seen and instead find ways of handling them that reduces their harm without erasing their trail.

On a more personal side of things, I value my fallibility because it shows me the places where I need growth. I promise that even when it is hard, I will view my failings as opportunities and directions to get better or do better.

In all this I find it very important to retain my fallibility both internally and publicly. I hope that I can present a full and complete picture of a person and in that full and complete picture is the idea that I not only can fail, but will do so.

I recognize my bias in my transparency

One of the ways that I hope to combat pedestal culture is to create more public examples of the highs and lows and all the in between of rope. That's why I write about the hard parts and the parts where things don't go as planned on top of the parts where things are great. The weird part is, no matter what I put online it will only be a part of who I am and it will be presented through my own eyes. There are parts of my life that will always remain private, but in the pieces I present to you I will do my best to present them as honestly as I can.

I will listen

As I mentioned, I am going to fail at some point. When I do so, the best I can hope is that I will have created enough rapport with those observing me that someone will feel empowered to speak up and tell me. When that happens I make three promises:

1) I will sit with my embarrassment

I know from other points in my life where I have misstepped, misspoken, or even just fucked up with no excuse or ignorance to blame, I will feel a wave of emotions from having that mistake brought to my attention. I know that I will want to deny it, that I will want to be angry with the person for bringing it to me, that I will be defensive, and more than any of that, I will be embarrassed.

I promise now, that I will sit with those emotions, I will feel them, and I will deal with them. It is not the responsibility of the person that brought my mistake to my attention to manage either how they feel the need to bring it up, or my reaction to it. I promise that I will not make my own emotions their problem. I promise that I will not take action until I have had time to process my own emotions.

2) I will not remove you from the conversation

When I was young I wanted to be a novelist, and one of the things that they teach you in any writing classes is that your audience must be considered while writing, because they are part of the work itself. I recognize that when I post something publicly I have opened up a dialog that includes everyone that reads that piece. Even if you never respond to me directly, that doesn't mean we aren't in conversation about it. I promise that when I mess up, I will not remove my readers from that conversation. Hiding any of the process from you when you were witness, or very likely silently affected by, whatever harm I have done removes your agency in the situation.

3) I will not center myself in the conversation

Furthermore, I recognize that when I post and a conversation is started, the ensuing conversation is not necessarily about me. Even if I learn from it, grow from it, recognize my own faults from it, that doesn't mean that the purpose of it existing was solely to educate me. Promising not to remove my audience from the conversation includes the recognition that you also have a right to learn and grow in the same ways I do.