Late last night I published a post that I woke up this morning feeling uncomfortable about. So I unpublished it.
I have occasionally found myself composing a difficult and emotionally charged email and then soon regretting having hit "send". So I have learned to allow a charged email to sit tight as a draft for at least 24 hours before launch. Sometimes after 24 hours such an email gets a major revision, sometimes it gets replaced by a face-to-face meeting, and sometimes it just gets deleted altogether.
Last night I allowed my self-imposed 'blogging-daily' deadline to overrule my gut telling me to hold off at least 24 hours on what I had written. Fortunately, this blog, unlike email, has an "unpublish" button.
To be clear, I did not write anything intentionally offensive or hurtful or even controversial. It was actually fairly vague and centered on a current events story that mirrors our experience this past year in a few ways. But if there is anything I have learned over the past year, it is that communication can and will go wrong in a hundred different unanticipated ways, especially when people start reading between the lines.
And reading between the lines is what my post encouraged.
Someday (perhaps) the time will be right to share more detail regarding our 2020 experience from my perspective. But for now it seems best for me to continue "to try to understand others" rather than "to be understood".
(If you are dying of curiosity, I continue to be more than willing to share more about my experience with friends over a cup of coffee or on the phone. I just don't want to air anything publicly that could cause trouble for other individuals or organizations. I do not seek revenge, even unintentional revenge.)
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