Health, Privacy & Inclusive Writing: the challenges of personal travel blogging

I have finally published my first post¹ on YMMV, celebrating my first nap-free day.

In the course of writing about the joys of staying awake (which I have to say is really wonderful), I encountered two big blogging challenges. I am probably going to be wrestling with them throughout this blog, so I thought I’d better lay them out on the table (something like what my friend Charlie Green calls Name It and Claim It).

1. I feel slightly awkward writing about my health in such a public forum.

In the first place I am a fairly private person.

In the second place, there seems to be a common attitude in parts of the country that poor health (or other misfortune for that matter) is a matter of moral failing: if one were only a better person, or a more devout Christian, or just bucked up and tried harder, illness would just melt away; and thus the absence of good health indicates a deep character flaw. (Perhaps on a more loquacious day I’ll write up a specific horror story in that vein from when we lived in Texas.) I fear, ever so slightly, that publicly documenting my health adventures may be held against me sometime in the future.

I have given the question of whether to discuss my health here some serious consideration. Whether or not such disclosure is prudent, it is almost impossible to write about the trip while keeping my health out of it: my health status is so intrinsic not just to our day to day lives, but also to our motivations for this trip and the logistics of how we go about it. After the Mini, my health really is the fourth cast member on this adventure. (Although I’m not planning on adding “Shaula’s Health” to the About page any time soon, and I’m really hoping Neil doesn’t take it into his head to do it either!)

For better or for worse, I’m including the story of my health. It is part of this trip and certainly part of this adventure, and hopefully much of the news I have to share will be good.

And anyone that holds my convalescence or this trip against me probably isn’t someone I want to associate with any way.

(Let’s hope I don’t rue this decision too much down the road. As it were.)

2. Writing a personal story in a public forum presents the challenge of writing for two distinct audiences.

I am familiar with the political and business blogging worlds, where best practices dictate that everything you write should speak to and include potential first time readers. This poses a particular challenge on a personal but public blog.

YMMV is first and foremost a fun and efficient way to keep our friends and family members informed about our adventures (and misadventures). At the same time, we are hoping that our effort to document our trip on the web may help other people planning similar trips, with information like reviews of the places we visit and the gadgets we use. In other words, in addition to writing for people that we know, we anticipate that this site may also be read by perfect strangers. (How nice to be a stranger, and by definition to be perfect!)

This blog is about this particular adventure in the greater context of our lives: footnoting it comprehensively would amount to writing our biographies. What presumptuous little whippersnappers that would make us! (“Whippersnapper” has been the word of the day around here today.)

Thus we face the challenge of writing for two distinct constituencies: perfect strangers, who don’t know who we are or what we’re up to; and people who already know us inside out.

We’d like YMMV to feel as intimate and irreverent as a phone call home (presumably collect), without feeling exclusionary or painfully self-referential for new readers. I expect we’ll get the balance wrong more often than not until we get a feel for the shape and style this blog will take, between providing too much back story or not enough, too much detail or too little. We’ll try to work out the right mixture as quickly as we can. We request your forbearance in the meantime.

And until we get the hang of it, if we seem to be enigmatic, just ask questions! We don’t mean to be mysterious or to write poorly: we’re just so busy living this adventure (and taking naps) that it is hard so far to find enough time to commit it all to the page.

And I hope we continue to struggle to find the time between adventures for writing. That sounds like a good kind of road trip to me.

1. I have to thank Neil for being the driving force (as it were) behind thinking up this blog, doing the yeoman’s work of the initial set up, and getting some writing up on the site from the very first day of the trip. He has really made YMMV happen, and now that I can stay awake for a few hours at a stretch, I look forward to pulling up my socks and contributing more around here, too. [↩]