Here it is! The existential crisis you've all been waiting for!

I think I am having that weird existential blogging crisis that I keep reading about on everyone else's blog but swore I'd never have myself.

Oh no, I am way too into my blog.
I need it!
I'll never stop...
or go anonymous...
or move somewhere else and start over!

But lately... roadblock city. I write something and it is *clearly* not the kind of thing I want to be publishing for heaven only knows who all of you people are now... I mean, there comes a time when you just kind of want to keep your insecurities for yourself. You know? I really don't want everyone out there knowing all of the ways in which I am small and impressionable and vulnerable and confused and scared, and the hundreds of times a day in which I question my life decisions big and small, and the constant longings to be elsewhere or elsewhen or sometimes even elsewho. That's too much power to just heave out into the undulating empty fullness of cyberspace.

And since lately my inner life seems to be composed exclusively of my insecurities and the corresponding coping mechanisms, I find myself lacking blog material, again. So I write about dumb stuff that occupies my mind for about 4 seconds, and then go back to thinking my grave and serious thoughts that I don't share. Is this messed up? I think the answer is probably yes, if you're me. I'm an external processor... you know, like a colostomy bag. If I leave it all inside, it just doesn't go through right.

I have been reminded that the entire original purpose of my blog was to connect and reconnect me with the people whom I love and need. I haven't been doing well at the connecting lately. E-mails pile up in my inbox, and for some reason it gets harder and harder to answer them, even though I desperately want to. Sometimes I feel like I am being swept farther and farther away from all of my dear friends, my shouts merely echoing off the cavernous walls. I feel ineffectual and clumsy in my private life. It's taking everything I've got to keep my head above water at work. I'm doing it, don't get me wrong, but it's knapp. It removes all my insides and sends them off in various and sundry e-mails signed "warm regards" and "cheers". And journal entries that I write in that state... simply unpalatable.

I'm beholden to this blog for so much: for being the locus, the collector and distributor of my random thoughts, for recording my life, for bridging gaps and reaching out and bringing me some of the most amazing people I've (n)ever met. So I will hang in there, because I know it's good for me, and maybe I can strike a compromise between letting it all hang out and clenching my pride too tightly.