Yeah, I know. Narcissism and paranoia readings are off the chart. But it's a topic, and I don't want to be bothered with coming up with a different one.

Specifically, I have a recurring fear of the folks at that one particular message board finding this. Note how I am not even telling you the name of the message board where I hang out. I'm too afraid that one of the teeming millions who read this will immediately go there and say "guess what I found!" just to be a jerk.

Yes, I am fully aware that I have no teeming millions. On an average day, perhaps as many as three people see my entry when it's listed among the most recently updated ones. But once I get going, my paranoia knows no bounds. For the purposes of this entry, there are hundreds of thousands of mysterious, black-cloaked figures who read me every day, and have set up small candle-lit shrines for me near their computers.

It sounds so silly when I actually write it out like that. Maybe that's why I obessively keep forcing myself to acknowledge it. If I didn't write out my fear and bring it into perspective by looking at it every so often, it really might make me insane. (You know, that's actually pretty clever of me. I wonder if I really am that perceptive, or if that's all just a rationalization for why I keep writing about my teeming millions. In any case, I think it worked, at least for now.)

So, the residents of Message Board X (I'm not completely cured, I guess. But, as someone far more clever than I pointed out, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you.") will in all likelihood, never find this.

But if they did...

It would be just plain disastrous if anyone on the message board ever saw this. It's not very good, and there's far too much of me in it.

Most of them would laugh. The ones who didn't laugh would be very very nice to me. I don't want any of that. It would be a thousand times worse getting either reaction from the people I consider friends.

Basically, they know me one way. This journal is another way. Both are more or less me, but it's the difference between talking to an aquaintance and talking to an intimate friend. Maybe you talk about the same things. Maybe you even say mostly the same things. But there's a line. On one side of my line are all of my insecurities and delusions, and things I don't want just anybody to know about me. Very few people get to cross the line.

I may have mentioned before that all the possibly nonexistant people who read this are in some sort of special subcategory. They have been granted special backstage passes to the darkest corners of my mind, because I know I'll never have to actually meet them. But I have met the people on this message board, (sort of) and it would be very hard for me to suddenly find them so close to my personal space.

Imagine you're at a party. You didn't know anyone when you walked in the door, but you've been there for a few hours now. You've joked around with some people, and shared a few inconsequential anecdotes from your childhood. You don't exactly think of these people as friends, but you kind of do. ("Over the years, I've come to think of you as... people I met." --A. Rimmer) Then, you go to the bathroom. You come back to the party, and learn the door was wide open the whole time, and everyone saw you at your most vulnerable.

***

What I'd like to do here is think of a solution, and wrap up this entry all nice and tidy-like. I'd like to figure out an answer, just so I don't have to keep thinking about it. This is the best I can come up with for now:

If you visit my message board, you may have noticed a user who describes herself as a college-educated waitress in Wisconsin. If you've made the connection between that user and the author of this journal, for god's sake, please don't tell anyone, especially the other people on that mesaage board. I would probably rather not know at all, but if you feel you must share with me what a delightfully small internet it is, do so in e-mail.

And one more disclaimer, for the road:

I know the chances of anyone from that message board happening to be here , out of probably dozens of similar diary networks, and then happening to read my stuff, out of the thousands of DiaryLand residents, is pretty damn close to infinitesimally small. But, I really do feel better, getting it out in the open like this. Even though it will probably never be an issue, just in case it is, my bases are covered.

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