It's A Sickness, That's What It Is

I'm pretty private about my blog. I have only told my close friends and family, I don't put my real name on here, I haven't told our friends at church about it - and you can ask me why all you want to, but the bottom line is that it's hard for me to explain. It may have something to do with the fact that I don't like to talk about what I've written - I write it down, and I read the comments, and I move on. The few times that I have been around people who were talking about what I've written, I was so uncomfortable that I can't even articulate it. I wanted to crawl under the floor and stay there until The Blog Talk stopped (so yes, Emma Kate, THANK YOU for bringing it up in front of our friends who didn't know the other night. That was a lot of fun for me). :-)

Another aspect of my blog secrecy is that I'm a little afraid that I'll tell somebody - maybe someone from church - and they'd read it and I'd run into them later and ask if they read it and they'd say, "Um. I. Uh. Yeah. I read it." And then the deafening silent disapproval would consume me.

ANYWAY, a couple of days ago a friend of ours mentioned that a former staff member at our church has a blog. David found it, bookmarked it, and when I finally got around to reading it, there were links to eight or nine people from church who also blog. None of the people are close friends of mine - just people I chat with on Sundays, or speak to when we're getting our kids from the nursery, or work with on a project from time to time.

So you can probably imagine what I've been doing all afternoon...it's like there's a whole new planet in my blogging universe. And I kind of want to comment on their sites - because now I feel free to tell them about mine - but is that invading their privacy somehow? Why do I feel like I need to be invited? Why is this so much weirder when dealing with people you know than it is when dealing with people you don't know?

Could I possibly be more paranoid?