The thing about blogging is that, assuming you're not completely awful at it, people eventually start reading what you write. Probably not a lot of people. Probably people you don't even know in the beginning. So you write whatever you feel like writing and you put yourself out there because it's just the internet, not real life. And it's fine for awhile, blogging in relative anonymity, without much thought of what it might lead to or concern for the potential consequences. But eventually, inevitably, your two lives, real and virtual, begin to collide, and the people you'd neatly slotted into one category or the other start to bleed into both. It's all terribly awkward.
It wasn't so much the collision of lives that bothered me. That unexpectedly turned out to be one of the best bits. Rather, the problem was the creeping self-consciousness, and the growing realisation that I wasn't hiding nearly as well as I thought I was. Being that vulnerable is unnerving, like when you're thirteen and you walk past a group of boys and, suddenly aware that you're exposed in a way you don't yet fully understand, start to blush uncontrollably. Apart from the self-consciousness, there was also the fact that I was no longer the same person I'd been when I started blogging. It's difficult enough to transition from angst-ridden teenager to marginally-less-angst-ridden adult at the best of times. It's even trickier when your entire emo-style rantings are there in black and white for all to see.
I toyed with the idea of a 'hidden' blog, but I'm terrible at keeping secrets and any attempt at a public-but-anonymous blog would, I think, have failed miserably – too much effort to maintain, too stripped of detail and context to be of interest to anyone, myself included. So I stopped blogging. Truthfully, I think I was just bored and had finally run out of things to say. But the other thing about blogging is that the urge never entirely goes away. And when life gets interesting again, when thoughts and ideas and opinions previously exhausted resurface anew, fresh and ready for interrogation, the fingers get itchy once again. So here I am. I have so much to tell you.

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