anonymous blogging

There are a few blogs that I read regularly. They are all anonymous blogs, though to differing degrees of anonymity. As much as I love blogs (reading and writing), I crave the personal connectivity to someone. I went to San Francisco about six months ago, and if it had been completely up to me, I would have written the SF anonymous blogger and asked to meet for coffee. In a way, I feel like these people are all my friends, and I want them to be my friends in real life. Because of the connection I feel to them through their most private thoughts, I find it hard to restrain myself from tapping that connection further and bursting their anonymity bubble, even knowing full well that the bubble is a safety barrier for me, too.

I have been reading one particular anonymous blog for a little over a year now, and I just have so much respect for the author that I've always wondered her true identity. Despite almost always vague about things including the city she lives in, her posts seem to mention things that resemble people and places around me that it always made me wonder just how closely linked we actually are.

Recently, she mentioned something rather specific that seemed possible for me to google and to deduce her true identity. Seizing on this opportunity last week, I went searching in local papers for news that may match the cameo mention from her blog. As luck would have it, even though some of my assumptions were wrong, I came upon a news article that led very quickly through a couple of additional searches to her real identity.

My curiosity has definitely been satisfied, and I'm super excited to now concurrently read her public blog along with the anonymous one, but I can't help feeling slightly uneasy. I wasn't exactly privy to the knowledge of her identity, nor her public blog. In an ironic way, I feel like I am trespassing on her life and her thoughts by now reading her non-anonymous blog and by knowing who she is.

I then think back to my own blogs: my public one that had gathered an audience, a semi-anonymous one that didn't really work, and now this one. I finally killed my public one after three years of writing in it after realizing that I was no longer writing for myself but rather for my readers. The things I wanted to write for myself couldn't be written without sacrificing my much-wanted personal privacy. The semi-anonymous blog didn't work out as I didn't know how to say no to friends (acquaintances) asking for the url, and it degenerated into a semi-public blog.

As for this one, the verdict remains to be seen. I sometimes wonder if I'm being too restrictive and evasive about generalizing things here, so much so that it hinders my writing because I spend more time figuring out how to disguise elements of a story to de-couple it from my real life than just writing what's on my mind.

For the time-being, I am still writing here for me, which fills the right void for me.