Transparency. It’s a simple enough idea. As a blogger, I should willingly give myself over to the idea that my readers would better understand and appreciate my work if they understood where I am personally. It isn’t as if I haven’t revealed enough about myself on the About page. But I have left out certain aspects of my life on Motiveless Crime for some time.

Perhaps my readers don’t care that I am gay. Or that I have two dogs that I adore, Cooper and Rune. Or that my best friend is my mother and has been since I was born. But these are the most important aspects of my life, and at times I feel hiding them from the people who read some of my most inner thoughts is somewhat misleading.

I grow tired of using neutral language for things that I would much rather make more explicit. But this isn’t the gay 90’s anymore. This is 2009; somehow we’ve made a step backward. Of course, there are other considerations for my self-censorship.

Within the past couple of months, I decided to stop hiding on the internet. I used to revel in the web’s ability to lend itself to anonymity. For the longest time, if you Googled my name, nothing within the first two pages of results would render you closer to knowing anything about me. But now, after some drastic altering of my intentions, at least three results directly link to a large array of information on me, not to mention I’m the only Justin Waldrop who has filled out a Google Profile which features my image and more on the first page of results.

I’ve entered a new phase in my life that seems to have spurred from time I spent in a world I only dreamed of. I used to hide a lot about who I was.  I didn’t believe I would be welcomed openly because of my sexual orientation, political beliefs or even my appearance. Attending a liberal arts college full of hipsters whose hygiene habits left much to be desired did little to alter this fear of being ‘known’.

After college I found myself thrown into a world of sexual openness, even frankness. I discovered that being myself either attracted or repelled people to me, for better or worse. I learned to stop hiding. Somehow in the meantime I lost myself. Sometimes freedom comes with a price. Too much of it can cause us to forget that a certain level of restraint does have a place in our lives.

Now that I’ve distanced myself from that situation, I find myself slowly growing a sense of self-awareness. Instead of being wild and free, I’m slowly allowing more and more of my own personality into the world both virtually and to those who are actually in physical contact with me. It feels like I’ve been holding my breath for a long time and am slowly letting out the toxic carbon dioxide.

I’m learning to be more transparent. You can like me or not.

This is just my way of saying that Motiveless Crime is adopting a more liberal stance on what it will publish and what it won’t. I’ll be saying more, revealing more and opening up about more personal issues as well as continuing the regular content for which the site has developed its reputation.

After all, Motiveless Crime was built on the premise that having an opinion and being oneself can be a crime to someone, somewhere. That being an individual is a freedom society naturally suppresses. This is the place to let it loose. Let the animal run free.

It is a calculated risk, I know. MC is now connected to my name. My friends, family and exes can now track me down and see what I’m thinking and saying about my life and those around me. But this is the price I am willing to pay for being myself. What you see is what you get.

Being yourself can be a crime, and believe it or not, it is motiveless.