30 Days of blogging Honesty, Day 04

A blogger friend I’ve known for over five years told me she has been blogging anonymously all this time and most of what I know about her is her fantasy. My reaction to the news is…

Well, I suppose I would be disappointed and a bit hurt, at first. That being said, I wouldn't be all that shocked. I am a pretty new blogger (I would start blogs and not keep up with them), but I have been a member of many forums over the last few years and things like that happen more often than you would think.

Online, you can be whoever you want to be. It is easy to hide behind a screen and lie about who you are or pretend to be some made up person. I've come across people who create complete and total fake lives for themselves. In one case, even had one on my facebook friend's list. She seemed totally legit. She had a ton of friends, posted pictures of herself all the time. She frequently wrote about her day, going into detail. She texted with people she met on the forum (not me, but I knew of others), and was really popular on the board. It came out that she had stolen all of the pictures, had a real guy thinking he was engaged to her (though he never met her or saw her on skype), and nothing we knew of her was true. She was in her mid-thirties with kids and a husband. She was bored. Her husband outed her and "her" facebook/myspace disappeared.

Sadly, this was just one encounter. I have encountered someone faking a pregnancy, faking cancer, and a few other total fakers. Because of all of that, I am very guarded when getting to know someone online. I really don't have many online friends because of this, and the ones I do I am not super close to. (That is also partly because I am super shy and socially awkward, but whatev.) So, if I did get to know someone over five years and found out they were a fake, it would be hurtful. It would suck, but I wouldn't be shocked. It would cause me to be even more guarded. That is the nature of the internet. Most of the time, we really don't know who we are talking to.

If you would like to partake in the 30 Days of Blogging Honesty, check out my post on it Here and on Tom's Blog Morning Erection. Happy Easter and see you tomorrow for day 5!