Never has it been so easy to not be yourself. Everyone can have a platform to project their persona. Whether you blog in detail about your daily life or fill Facebook with photos of your family, half the world can be invited into your life and they have no idea if it is really you.
How do we know what you are telling us is true? It is much more fun to make up a life, a past and present. Of course if friends and family in real life are reading your blog and seeing your posts on Facebook, they will know. If you have no friends in real life, even better, nobody out there will know the real you. Write about your dramatic decade or your perfect present, take twenty years off your age. Post pictures of someone else or recreate yourself in cartoon form. When you are on holiday take photographs of the view from ‘your house’. In the botanical gardens snap ‘your garden’. When you feel like a break from blogging invent a rare illness or a life threatening operation.
But will anybody find out you didn’t really spend ten years in the Amazon ( the real Amazon in South America ) Jungle. No. Even in real life you can recreate yourself every time you move to a new town. How often do you meet new people and believe every word they tell you about their life, which is far more interesting than yours. And your good friends; off they go to visit their highly successful son who owns a tropical island. You have never met the son, because he lives on his tropical island. Unless you actually go with them on holiday how do you know any of it is true?
Among writers Dan Mallory has apparently surpassed us all by being nominated for the British Book Awards, despite or perhaps because he cheated at being British. The best selling author also lied about having cancer and the death of family members. It should come as no surprise to hear that he writes under a pen name A. J. Finn. Perhaps he doesn’t exist at all, which would be an even cleverer cheat.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/aj-finn-dan-mallory-british-book-award-nomination.html
But what about the rest of us? Even if you are not outed as a pathological liar by The New Yorker magazine, do WordPress or Facebook know where you really live, can they pinpoint your location, see you sitting in your pyjamas at your computer in a corner of your suburban bedroom, instead of the pine summerhouse looking out over the lower slopes of the Alps. Yes, of course they can, but are they going to tell?
Everyone is welcome here.
Tidalscribe will be Remaining in the European Union.
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 
I have the opposite problem. I have a website Alien Resort where I describe sending scripts to Aliens, they prepare comics, and I get them published in newspapers. Even if I show someone a newspaper tear sheet, they don’t believe the part about the aliens. I enjoyed your post by the way.
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Thanks David, I shall follow your aliens.
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Thank you for the show of support.
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What a great post!
I have no idea if I live in the real world or my own make believe one – they’re both equally surreal, they both overlap and they both kind of look the same from the Windows of my Mansion!
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Thanks Tom – glad you enjoyed it, long may we continue to lose touch with reality.
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The only unreal place I live in is the land of make believe that exists in my novels. There was a time when my real life was so difficult I retreated into storyland with my characters. However things have calmed down on the home front and suddenly I have lost the way with fiction and have reverted to writing poetry instead. No matter, if I get a reaction, whether it is pleasure or laughter, I am content.
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Hi Julie, sounds as if you are very versatile with your writing. Reality can mix with fiction such as when I found myself saying in a conversation ‘Oh I know someone who did that’ and realised it was one of my characters.
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Well, i don’t suppose someone will come and say, “hey, i lie every day and no one’s caught me yet.” But that aside, I’d say it’s easy to lie, yes, but to your friends and even bloggers you become friends withwould be harder, don’t you think? Can a person keep track of all the lies and stay in character? Maybe a determined liar could, but they’d probably need to keep things written… I certainly don’t post everything about myself,my private life is private. But, hmmmm…. now, you got me thinking!
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Hi Jina. It is hard enough keeping track of my characters’ secrets, so I would not be able to keep track of an invented life for myself. But there is a whole lot of mine and my family’s life, that I don’t share on line.
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I like this idea😊!
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