2003-09-24 - 9:58 p.m.

You know, online diaries, journals, blogs, whatever you call them, are dangerous things. Maybe not for everyone, but for people like me, certainly.

It started so innocently. I wanted a forum to write to an audience. I had things in my head I thought people would find interesting. Often they had nothing to do with me at all, they were just random musings.

Then it started getting more personal. People seemed to like that. There’s something about the romance angle, I guess, even if it was rife with failure. It hit home for a lot of people. That was great, because I was reaching people. For a while.

The problem came when, for a while, I seemed to stop feeling things the way I used to. I started feeling like a third party observer of my own life. I didn’t feel directly, I merely sympathised with my situation, whatever it was. I knew something was wrong with me but I didn’t understand what it was. Seeing everything through that filter kept me from even seeing the filter for what it was.

After a while, though, it went away. I was helping people through things I couldn’t write about in my diary because they weren’t my story any more. The things going on with me personally didn’t seem worth writing about, so I didn’t have that emotional release of organizing my thoughts and throwing them at a world that could handle them better becasue they couldn’t care as much. After a while, without the diary I’d come to rely on to filter out the strength of my own feelings, I wasn’t strong enough to handle it all any more. My happy-go-lucky meets pillar of strength personality started to crack. My devotion to helping others wouldn’t let me falter on the people who’d come to rely on me so I started to fall apart instead. I started to feel like a failure. I became obsessive in my search for love so maybe I could validate myself, or if not, at least find someone to help hold me up while I held up everyone else. I lost nearly 10 pounds I didn’t have without noticing and became dangerously malnourished. I was dying, mentally and physically and didn’t even realize it. There was just too much too fast.

After a while I pulled myeslf together. It took a long time, but I pulled it off. I didn’t stop writing in my diary entirely, but I only wrote at the extremes. The extreme highs and extreme lows found their way into my page and nothing else seemed worth it. It was a way to keep feeling without making my head split in half when I needed the release. The problem with that is, while it’s a great balance for me, it’s not good for those who read it. Because all they see is the extremes. When I’m peaking, whether it be amazing or terrible, I sit and I write and I do my best to capture it. So a cross-section of that time, be it only five desperate minutes, is the few people who still read this see. Things sound worse than they are, people worry when they shouldn’t and people think things that aren’t true, and again, I don’t know what to do. Save those around me from the stresses of worrying about me and hold the pressure in until it dissipates or let it out and make people worry when they don’t need to? My only choice is to post this frist, so everyone understands, and hope they remember it when I scare them again.