This is nice framing. I find myself doing (1) more than (2). (2) can feel dishonest sometimes too. Like, who am I to speak for the universe? You can end up stretching the cone of your perspective wider than you deserve to.
personal contextual issues that don't matter
This is so tough but fair. The easiest stuff to write is personal.
Buried in there is another generally unspoken thing: the contextual issues that don't matter are devilishly hard to identify. Sometimes the fact that it's your story is why people care, at all, about the story.
So now there's a dialectic between these assorted desires: to subsume the I, to tell the truth, to give of yourself. It's hard to know the right thing to do.
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