You fear being seen for who you actually are by people who know you on the surface level. If they know more about you, you are in danger. But i don't want to be in danger anymore. I want to be able to do this. Share myself. Safely. I want to be able to express myself without pushing it too hard. I don't want to alienate my acquaintances. I just want them to have some access to me, to know more about me. I want to be known. I don't want to be a shut in. I want people to get enough of a glimpse into my life, enough of an idea of who i am, to be close to me without knowing too much. Why has it been so hard for me to do this? It seems like everytime i try this out, i get too close and disclose too much. Make myself too available for everyone. Makes it less intimate and more creepy. This access to me is just a fact of modern life, unless i moderate it. Perhaps i am a compulsive self discloser. I couldn't stop if i wanted to. I have to get uncomfortably close to my online audience, or i am not being myself. But doesn't this hurt me? Doesn't it pose a threat? I don't quite know. I don't care that much. I wonder why i don't care, but i really don't think about it much. Being myself and expressing things exactly the way i want to is somehow much more important to me than my own safety and security. It makes me wonder sometimes, why my priorities are the way that they are.

I find myself defensively retreating into a shell and deleting everything about me off the face of the digital world. Refusing to ever share myself. For this fear of not being able to hold back, being swept up into the moment and indulge myself too much in the luxury of broadcasting my very personal anecdotes to acquaintances. Something addictive about it. Challenging people. Getting up into their faces and making a mess out of myself. Perhaps i am a proficient clown. Something about it that hurts me, but thrills me at the same time.

Perhaps this is what writers feel like. Especially the ones that write about dark, depressing, taboo subjects. Books like that aren't mere facets of the author's identity, they're about something. But my writing isn't about something. It's about me. Why?