The early morning hours can be the most troublesome for me. I swim to the surface of a nice-enough dream and land straight in my day-to-day reality. It is, I can assure you, not dreamlike. In fact, those early morning hours when I’m lying awake often feature a parade of my worst case scenarios come to life.

I should get up. I should get up and brush my teeth and start my day. I know this, because when I eventually haul myself out of bed and do it, the worst case scenarios melt down to the bearable reality. But I want to get back to the nice-enough dream and so I burrow in and try for another go at sleep.

Sometimes it works and occasionally I’ll wake up feeling spiffy and ready to meet my day. More often, I wake up an hour later, feeling drugged because I’ve slept too long. When it doesn’t work, I’m left to deal with all the stuff that I don’t want to deal with in daylight–and then some.

As anyone who knows me through ByJane and MidLifeBloggers is aware, I often write myself out of my sad places. Or at least I have in the past. Now–now I’m a little more loathe to do so. Or maybe a lot more than a little.

I’m feeling very self-protective lately. I’m feeling very unsure of where and what and why I am and I’m fearful of put something out there that will be read in any other way than as I intended it. Yes, I would like to control the way people read my words. I work hard to make them specific and true to me, but despite that, my readers have their own agendas, and they will not obey mine.

So I’m not writing the specifics of my sad places, which means that I’m sort of stuck like sludge in them. I came up with an idea this morning for how I could get around that. I would start a new blog, an anonymous blog that would be a repository for all my writing that feels too vulnerable for public dissemination. When I was a kid, I had a red leather diary, with a key no less, that I kept on and off for not very long. I would address my diary directly, but I was young enough that spelling was still an issue for me. I would write, “Dear Dairy.”

I thought, what a great name for this new blog that would contain my most private posts. It would be plain, perhaps a template that looked like notebook paper. The font would be something handwriting-ish. The header would–and here I pulled up short. Header? Template? Font? For whom? Who would be reading this new blog of mine? And wouldn’t the fact that there were readers drastically interfere with my need for total privacy?

Well, yes, it would. But if no one read what I wrote, then what was the point?

That’s when I realized that for me, writing is a performative act; it requires an audience. In some ways, that seems a bit creepy to me. I have this image of my 9 year old self on the school bus flipping her skirts up to get attention. I know people who do that with their blogs. There’s a fine line between showing one’s vulnerable side and TMI. Some bloggers do it well; they’ve built careers on it, and I admire them. Some bloggers I just want to say, “Pull your skirt down and find another way to fulfill yourself.” I think that fine line is mostly in the eye of the beholder–and of the writer. Which is, I suppose, my way of saying, It’s fine for you, but not, I think, for me. At least right now.