one of these days I'm going to leave you in your sleep

In a spectacular example of creating drama for myself, I keep turning over in my head the question of whether I want to tell one of my oldest friends about this space. Am I the only idiot who keeps getting a pit in my stomach about the possibility of revealing these foolish ramblings to people? I told my friend B, and she has been nothing short of awesome about:

• not being completely horrified (although I divulged my secret to her over email, so I didn't get to see the look of wtf?!? that may have been spreading across her face at that moment)
  
• not telling anyone else
  
• not being judgmental, and-
  
• not staging an intervention.

This should have been an overflowing champagne glass of courage. It should have strengthened my resolve to tell others. What's more- I have met many really great people through this odd little dark blue corner of small fonts, and even smaller ideas. That should have further convinced me that sharing this rather silly secret is fairly innocuous. But, because I am highly illogical, it did not.

If I am being uncharacteristically honest, I can admit that I have always been really sensitive about writing. I have never thought of myself as a particularly decent writer, but it's always been important to write something, anything to maintain my sense of existing. And that proof of existence was for me, not for anyone else.

When I am really low, when I have become inconsolable, I become so silent that there are no words in my head. I will speak, because I have been socialized to speak. I will speak, because if you don't speak, the alarm bells go off, people worry, and frantic attempts to cheer you up ensue. The silence only resides in a place that is always thought of as quiet anyway. It's the written word that gets lost. I feel like a mute, though outwardly I am smiling and making small talk.

Given that, maybe, just maybe, these meaningless words mean something to me. Perhaps, quite possibly, I am overprotective of these words.

The strangest aspect of the swirling in my head at the moment is this: at least half of the time I am writing here, I am writing with W in mind. The tone and the topics are similar to what my emails to W contain so much of the time, it was startling to come to that realization yesterday and not sooner. This creates an odd conundrum- to not tell W feels like a betrayal, and yet to come clean seems daunting on several different levels. We have been drifting apart a bit over the last few years because of geographical distances, but I cannot decide if exposing this little pasttime would turn the rift into a chasm or mend it some.

Wow, or maybe I just need to get a life.