How much of yourself will you give?

On authority and authenticity and rarely getting to have both.

Lately, I’ve been thinking less about what I post and more about what I don’t. Not because I’m trying to be mysterious, but because I’m starting to feel the cost of being open online. It’s not just trolls or critics. It’s the way every piece of you that becomes content stops belonging to you. I’ve had moments where I felt like I was writing in my voice, only to realize later I was just feeding the persona I’d built. That persona is useful. It opens doors and makes you recognizable to people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. But who are they meeting?

The topics that I write about: family, children, and the navigation of contemporary life without falling into one of the many manholes that litter the land, are intimately tied to my own experiences. Each piece of writing involves selling fragments of myself. The process of deciding how much to reveal or conceal is constant and somewhat strategic, though I suck at strategy.

The tension between authenticity and authority is a restatement of a basic truth: that we are all human. Your laundry will inevitably be dirty, at least occasionally, and there’s always an incentive to air it. Personal essays dominate platforms like Substack because readers are drawn to messy disclosures that polite conversation rarely tolerates. The xoJane essay is alive and well and continues to thrive as long as there are eyeballs on screens.

An adjacent category, the “woe is them” essay, performs equally well. These pieces offer vivid portrayals of someone else’s quiet desperation or disastrous choices, inviting readers to affirm their own relative competence, compassion, or worldview: “If they’d just do what my ideology thinks is best, they wouldn’t be having all these problems”. We like these narratives because modern life often lacks a clear script, and stories offer some comforting narrative scaffolding in the whirlwind of confusion. The reader walks away feeling reassured, either inspired by success or comforted by someone else’s failures. Reality TV fills a similar niche for a different social stratum.

My friend Mary Harrington coined the phrase “digital hijab” to describe a posture many online creators should adopt. You avoid showing your face, your family, or giving clues about your location because the GeoGuessr guys are always on the case. Following basic internet hygiene, the digital hijab sets a lower bound of protection, especially if your opinions err on the side of spicy. It works well for many writers, but hampers those of us who take “write what you know” a bit too seriously, or think of being seen as an important part of the process.

Another route is anonymity, popular because it allows considerable creative freedom. The anonymous persona is a blank slate, available to populate with pure legend and freed from the daily demands of life in the real world. The problem with anonymity is that it carries the constant risk of eventual exposure, but more deeply, in the fact that pure legend is not how humans exist in the embodied world. The anon is limited by the assumption of curation. An anonymous persona is essentially a black box producing advice, humor, or critique without the checks provided by real-life accountability. In the eyeballs-based economy of online discourse, there’s a constant temptation to push the persona further into elaborate or outrageous territory. If wisdom is in any way correlated with living a good life, the anon gets to skip that conundrum. What can you truly learn about life from someone who stays only partly human?

The anonymous poster occupies a fascinating space as a form of contemporary performance art, posing as a prophet. But they’re missing a crucial element: the road test. Knowing what to believe and knowing what to do are overlapping but fundamentally distinct domains. A persona that is pure legend may offer clarity of thought but lacks the authenticity born from personal trials and vulnerabilities. Deep authenticity is part of anonymity, but it’s a curated form of authenticity, with no stakes in the real world. Just like the real person has to perform stability, the anon has to perform flamboyant wisdom.

Today’s internet panopticon fuels the illusion that if you're not fully transparent, you must be hiding something shameful. The boundary between public and private life has eroded dramatically, and as a result, holding back can feel suspicious. But privacy remains essential. Privacy is the soil in which intimacy grows. Without boundaries, genuine intimacy and personal growth become impossible.

Authenticity sells because people crave relatable vulnerability. But the audience doesn’t want just vulnerability for its own sake. People crave benchmarks. They seek guideposts, assurances that their experiences are normal. Managing a public persona means constantly calibrating how much authenticity you offer and at what cost.

Ultimately, your persona is public property. The more you reveal, the less control you get to keep. Personal details, once shared, become part of a collective archive open to critique, praise, or misinterpretation. At some point, we might declare bankruptcy on our imperfections or retreat entirely into curated personas. Or get off the internet completely and sell artisanal candles by the side of the road (considered it.) Will the next iteration of the internet be focused on disclosure, or privacy, or, finally, a winning combination of the two?

The temptation to be fully seen is very powerful. So is the illusion that being seen means being understood. Privacy is the soil in which intimacy grows, and intimacy doesn’t scale, even if some online interactions keep a whiff of it.