Exposing My Self

Everyone puts themselves on the line online, but could personal disclosure hurt my professional career?

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

As long as I’m careful enough, everything will be okay, I thought. Obsessively combing over each line, I tweaked a sentence here, added a clarification there.

I’ll just send it to somebody to make sure it’s all right, I thought. I emailed it to a writer friend, someone who had been there during the surreal period of time that the story covered.

‘Take out the bit about the Nazis,’ she said.

‘But the Milgram experiments were inspired by the…’ I said.

‘Elaine, you just can’t,’ she said. ‘People will be, like, WOAH.’

(To paraphrase Coco Chanel, before you and your story leave the house, look hard at yourself in the mirror and take one thing off. In my piece about new motherhood, breastfeeding rhetoric and submission to authority, Nazis were that one thing.)

Maybe now it’s fine, I thought. While I may not control Medium, I’d done my utmost to control the message. But with the cursor lying on ‘Publish,’ my fingers hovered a millimetre above the trackpad of my laptop. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest and hear the progress of the second hand on the analog wall clock, its sound suddenly…