I never named anybody.
It didn’t matter. They recognised themselves.
Or they thought they did, which amounts to much the same thing once somebody has decided that a sentence on the internet is definitely about them.
Explaining that it wasn’t did not help. It probably made things worse. I was no longer merely a dangerous blogger. I was now a lying dangerous blogger who refused to admit that everything I wrote revolved around the people I worked with.
I have got myself into hot water before by writing about my day job.
I wrote about the atmosphere. The friction. The odd little cruelties that collect inside a workplace until everybody begins treating them as normal. I wrote about how it felt to spend most of my waking life somewhere that seemed to be making me increasingly miserable.
I avoided names. I left out locations. I changed or removed details.
I thought that was enough.
It wasn’t.
People who work beside you do not need names. They know who was on which shift. They remember the argument in the office, the comment in the yard, and the morning somebody went home furious. A stranger might read a general reflection on workplace toxicity. A colleague reads it as evidence.
Sometimes they find themselves even when you did not put them there.
That is the danger of writing about work while you are still employed there. The post doesn't remain outside the workplace. It comes back through the door with you the following morning.
It becomes another workplace incident.
Another conversation behind a closed door.
Another reason for somebody to look at you as though you have done something unforgivable.
What I hated most was not simply getting into trouble. It was the feeling that a huge part of my life had become unavailable to me as a writer.
Work consumed most of my week. It affected my health, my mood, my relationships and how much of myself I had left when I finally got home. Yet I was expected to behave as though none of it could be mentioned because somebody might identify themselves in the shadows.
That was difficult.
It still is.
A public secret
I do not promote HKT.
I do not share it on social media. I do not link to it from other websites. It appears in Derek Sivers’ directory of Now pages, but that is about it.
HKT is one of my secrets.
Admittedly, a secret with its own domain name is not a particularly secure secret.
Anybody can read it. Search engines can find it. Somebody could send a link to somebody else. A colleague who knows I keep a blog could probably locate it without calling in the services of an international private investigator.
Still, its obscurity matters.
HKT is not part of the social-media firehose. I do not publish a post and then push it under the noses of everybody I know. I put it here. A few people might stumble across it. Most will not.
It feels less like standing on a stage and more like leaving a light on in a small room.
Somebody might notice it from the road.
That is enough.
But quiet is not private. I know that now.
Perhaps I always knew it, but chose not to think about it too hard.
Why publish any of it?
My wife has sometimes found it difficult to understand why I feel the need to keep a publicly accessible journal.
I understand her concern.
Writing something down and making it available to the world are two different decisions. The first preserves the memory. The second introduces risk.
A private journal would allow me to record everything without worrying about colleagues, relatives, neighbours, future employers or passing strangers with too much time on their hands.
But something changes for me when writing is published.
A private entry records an experience.
A public piece bears witness to it.
I am driven to make a record of my life. I am not entirely sure why. I have always written things down, even when there was no obvious audience and no possibility of making money from it.
Especially then, perhaps.
Memory is unreliable. I know this because mine is full of holes.
Experiences that once seemed impossible to forget become blurry surprisingly quickly. The order changes. The language disappears. The sharp edges wear down. Sometimes the emotion survives long after I can remember what caused it.
Writing fixes a small flag into the ground.
This happened.
This is what I thought.
This is how it felt at the time.
It does not make the memory completely accurate. Nothing can do that. It preserves one version before that version disappears.
HKT is meant to become part of my legacy.
I feel slightly uncomfortable writing that because the word legacy sounds grand, and HKT is not grand. It is a collection of thoughts, complaints, memories, jokes, small victories, health worries and occasional attempts to make sense of things.
There will probably be more references to cheese than any respectable legacy should contain.
But one day I will not be here.
My friends and family will still be able to read this. Perhaps future generations will find it too. Someone I will never meet might wonder who I was, what kind of life I lived and what mattered to me.
They will not find the complete answer here.
They may find enough.
They will know that I loved my family. That I worried about money and health. That I worked jobs which sometimes wore me down. That I wrote. That I made music. That I was frequently angry about the state of the world and tried not to let that anger consume everything else.
They may also discover that I swore too much.
That is part of the record as well.
Publishing creates the possibility that somebody else might recognise the experience while I am still alive.
A person trapped in a poisonous workplace might read something I wrote and realise that they are not weak, oversensitive or completely alone. Somebody struggling with illness, regret, money or the ordinary disappointment of being human might find a sentence that helps.
I do not expect HKT to change the world.
Helping one person feel slightly less alone would be enough.
Everybody arrives at the same page
There is a phrase for part of the problem: context collapse.
In ordinary life, we talk differently to different people. A conversation with Rhona is not the same as a conversation with my manager. What I tell an old friend over a drink is not necessarily what I announce in the warehouse on Monday morning.
Different people know different parts of us.
The boundaries happen naturally.
Publishing online flattens them.
The reader I imagine might be a stranger who understands exactly what I mean. The actual reader might be a colleague looking for evidence that I have insulted them. It could be a manager, an old friend, a relative or somebody mentioned only indirectly in the story.
They all arrive at the same page.
I might have written towards one person, but the internet makes the words available to everybody.
I see an essay about how a workplace affected me.
A colleague sees an accusation.
Rhona sees a risk.
A future member of my family may see a fragment of history.
None of them is necessarily wrong.
I do not control what happens once the words leave me.
That is the frightening bit.
Whose story is it?
I have the right to tell the truth about my own life.
Unfortunately, my life contains other people.
They did not necessarily agree to appear in my journal. They may remember an incident differently. They may think I misunderstood them. They may simply believe that their working day should not become material for somebody else’s essay.
Removing a name does not remove the person.
Nor does it remove their right to dignity.
At the same time, I do not believe anybody else should have complete ownership over what I am allowed to remember, feel or write.
A difficult workplace already consumes enough of a person’s life. It should not be allowed to confiscate the internal record as well.
There must be a difference between writing about what happened to me and publishing a verdict on everybody involved.
“I felt undermined” belongs to me.
“He was deliberately trying to destroy my confidence” claims knowledge of somebody else’s mind.
That line looks obvious when written down.
It was not always obvious when I was furious.
Anger can make certainty feel like evidence.
It can also make publication feel urgent.
Sometimes the urgency is the warning.
Keeping secrets
Reading Patrick Rhone’s work has helped me understand that writing and publishing are not the same activity.
Patrick writes personally, but his blog is not an uncensored broadcast of everything that happens inside his life. Experiences are allowed to settle. An argument, disappointment or crisis might eventually become an essay, but by then the piece is usually about something larger.
The incident has done its work.
It does not always need to survive into the finished piece.
Patrick keeps secrets too.
So do I.
There are things I have written that will never appear on HKT. There are other things that may have to wait until I retire, until the people involved are no longer vulnerable, or until I understand what I was actually trying to say.
Some things may have to wait until I am less angry.
That could take a while.
The need to write something does not create a duty to publish it.
I wish I had understood that more clearly years ago.
I think part of me believed that withholding something made the journal dishonest. That unless I published the difficult bits while they were happening, I was allowing somebody else to silence me.
Perhaps sometimes I was.
But silence and delay are not the same thing.
A story can wait without disappearing.
Record everything. Publish selectively.
I do not want fear to stop me recording my life.
Work takes up too much of it to be removed from the journal completely. The frustrations, absurdities, exhaustion and occasional kindnesses of working life have shaped me.
Pretending otherwise would leave a large hole.
Perhaps the answer is to write the raw version first.
Write what happened while it is still fresh. Include the names, the sequence, the anger and the small details that will otherwise vanish.
But do not automatically press Publish.
Put it away.
Come back later.
Ask what I know and what I have assumed. Separate what somebody did from the motive I have assigned to them. Work out whether the experience still means what I thought it meant while sitting in the car park muttering, “For fuck’s sake.”
Then perhaps it can become a public essay.
By that point, the important question is no longer simply whether the account is true.
What is it really about?
Am I trying to illuminate something, or am I trying to make somebody pay?
Does another person need to remain the villain for the piece to work?
Can I preserve the emotional truth without publishing the entire evidence bundle?
Would anything be lost by waiting?
Sometimes the answer will be that nothing should be published.
That does not make the writing pointless.
Silence is not always cowardice. Omission is not automatically dishonesty. Restraint can be part of telling the truth properly.
One hundred
This is the hundredth post published on this incarnation of HKT.
I had not planned anything grand for it. There will be no commemorative plaque. No brass band. No celebrity endorsement.
Unless things have gone terribly wrong, there will be no flypast.
Still, one hundred feels significant.
These posts are a scattered account of who I have been. Some are important. Some are trivial. Some seemed important when I wrote them and now look slightly ridiculous.
That is fine.
This is an imperfect journal, not an authorised biography assembled by a committee after my death.
Perhaps it is appropriate that number one hundred is partly about what does not appear here.
HKT is not the whole of my life.
It cannot be.
It contains what I remembered, what I understood and what I eventually decided I could make public. Behind it sits another archive: private notes, abandoned drafts, withheld names, half-formed thoughts and stories that have not yet found their proper shape.
Some of those stories will come later.
Some will wait until retirement.
Some will remain secret forever.
None of that makes this less real.
One day, when somebody comes looking for me in these pages, I hope they find a recognisable human being rather than a polished version assembled for public consumption.
Someone who tried.
Someone who failed fairly regularly.
Someone who loved deeply, worried constantly, laughed at inappropriate moments and kept writing because he could not quite help himself.
I will continue to record my life because there are things I do not want to lose.
I will continue to publish because another person might find something useful here, and because I want to leave something behind for the people who care about me.
But I must remember that my truth is not the only truth in the room.
Perhaps that is the secret inside the secret.
I do not publish because I have nothing to hide.
I publish because there are things I do not want to forget.