September 14th, 2006, 1:06 pm

She’ll never work again.

It’s stuck with me, the words of a business acquaintance in describing my work on hollabackpack.com:

“Have to admit that I’d love to be on a raucous trip around Europe destroying all future hopes of employment wasting brain cells and spending my nest egg.” - JoeReger.com, italics mine

Wow. Never work again. At 25.

All I because I was honest about a little dope and a little booze on a travel blog.

Yikes.

Now, I know the author was making a joke, but his words have a ring of truth to them. For many businesses in America that perform background checks before hiring, having written candidly about such things would be enough reason to neatly move my job application into the recycling bin.

My mom wrote to me, to warn me of “potential employers” reading my blog. My dad hasn’t written anything in a while; perhaps a statement in itself.

Interesting world we live in, isn’t it - where what I write about while on vacation from working could bother future employers.

A younger Laura decided never to publish anything racy. She wrote an essay during the Poynter College Fellowship - a personal essay, filled with early-twenties angst regarding boys and drugs. Although she liked the essay, she declined to publish it on the program’s website, thinking to herself that she’d never get a job again if she did.

Fast forward two years.

This new version of Laura Fries - twenty-five years strong, thank you very much - is not afraid anymore. I made the conscious decision that if I was going to push myself as a writer, I was going to have to start being more honest.

In the earliest part of my writing career, I held so much back. As many journalists do, I wrote about others so I wouldn’t have to write about myself.

Your secrets?

Fodder for the press.

Mine?

Hidden under the guise of objectivity, I didn’t have to reveal them. Instead, they could be squashed down into little holes, where I never had to deal with them.

I can’t tell you how many amazing conversations I’ve had with my friend Larry, who for some reason, has inherited the position of Person To Whom I Tell All Manner of Ridiculous, Disgusting and Hilarious Truths about Life. I can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had where I, short of breath from laughing my ass off, stop and sigh: “Oh. My. God. If I could only blog about this, I would be the best blogger ever.“

Well, no more, compatriots.

No more.

I’m certainly not ready to spill all my beans - after all, I’ve just started on this whole honesty thing.

But I have noticed a very distinct difference in my approach to storytelling; now that I’ve confessed a thing or two on the public stage.

Writing feels looser. Honesty multiplies fingers into octopi, each autonomously crawling about in my innards in search of “genou!” … my phonetic rendition of the German word which means “exactly! I know exactly what you mean.”

I’m not sure exactly where it all leads - perhaps, as the blogger above foreshadows, it means I never work in America again.

But having spent the last week reading Anne Applebaum’s excellent history of Soviet labor camps Gulag, I can’t help but feel that freedom of expression - even about something as honestly insignificant as a joint - is worth a sacrifice or two.