Did you ever play Broken Telephone as a kid? I remember how quickly the original story could go left in those games, and that hasn’t changed as I’ve gotten older, just the topics we talk about.
Living in a small town, you hear a lot about what’s happening in the community. I’ve learned to take everything I hear with a grain of salt, because rarely does anyone have the complete story.
I’ve joked with my husband that everyone puts their own remix on the story when they tell it. I’ve realized that, most of the time, regardless of where you are, people tell the story to fit their own purposes. It’s up to you to figure that out and come to your own conclusions.
I’m grateful that I’ve learned to be skeptical of anything I hear. When someone tells me something has happened locally or abroad, I always check my reliable news sources to confirm the details.
Maybe it’s because of the work I’ve been doing for the past five years, researching and learning about topics I had no clue about, so I could write articles about them.
When you get paid to write articles, you have to make sure that you’re using credible resources and not information based on someone’s opinion in a blog. The practice has trained me to question everything I read or hear, and I appreciate it.
Some may consider me a cynic, but I believe I’m being practical. At the end of the day, we don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s essential to be mindful of what we treat as fact and learn how to identify it from fiction. 🩵