This morning I woke up to an email. It wasn’t an email I expected to get but certainly one I needed to get. People were worried about me.

It’s come to my attention that I’ve been acting like an idiot. Both online and offline, I’ve made an ass out of myself more times than I can count. While I considered just plain shutting up and taking a break for a while, I think that would be more irresponsible than I’ve already been.

As bloggers, we become role models whether we like it or not. We are responsible for our words and what we communicate. For the past few months, I haven’t been careful about what I’ve been communicating. I’ve been hiding behind sarcasm and laughing things off. I’ve made light of very serious things because I couldn’t deal with the seriousness yet.

In my attempts to do a real, un-sugar coated, “here’s what this process looks like,” I turned it into cheap exhibitionism. I treated my own broken heart with a level of indelicacy and coldness that I would never show another person. Then in an attempt to just get past it, I made light of it. I wrote posts while my emotions were still raw and didn’t communicate what I had hoped. Most of those posts I didn’t even go back and read or edit before posting them because I couldn’t handle reading what I had just written.

If you can’t read what you’ve written, you shouldn’t make others do so.

I wrote those things because I felt an obligation to show the whole picture. I failed when I left it at that. I didn’t discuss the consequences of that full picture.

We need to look at what we’re communicating to our readers. Whether you post your meals and marathons, blog about fashion, write about your sex life, or even talk about white girl problems; as bloggers we must be aware of what message we’re sending both intentionally and unintentionally.

I appeared flippant about drinking too much and sleeping around. The reality was quite the opposite. I was worried about both so I talked about it. Unfortunately I couldn’t resist making jokes. I was trying to protect my ego, no; I was trying to protect my self esteem.

I keep going back and forth between telling honestly and matter-of-factly what actually took place, and just letting it go and moving on. I’m not sure which would be more constructive at this point, both for me and for my readers. I won’t do it today, though, because I’m going to try to take my own advice and not write about it while my emotions are still raw. (Yes, I realize that by writing this post at all I’m breaking that, but didn’t feel it was appropriate to not address it once I realized how things have looked.)

I’ve been a poor representative of both myself and Hollaback Health. I apologize to both my readers and my fellow Hollaback Girls. I went blatantly against the “Please Blog Responsibly” message that we stand for. I’m grateful, though, that it was them who cared enough about me to say, “Kendra, there’s a problem here.”