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I’m always disappointed to discover I’m not really anonymous.

Yesterday, I was most perturbed when that old friend of mine said, “I read your blog.”

Hearing him, I simply replied, “Oh dear.” My default reply to anyone who knows me.

Perturbed because last time we met, I didn’t even have a blog.

I did have a GeoCities website, but I don’t remember telling anyone about that.

Those were my years off radar, when I only wrote occasionally.

Regardless, that old friend described himself as a lurker.

Ah, what a horrible discovery: that someone who knows me has read my innermost thoughts.

Not for the first time, of course. Last year, a close friend’s brother revealed himself to be a reader.

He, too, described himself as a lurker, sent my way by yet another.

Well, no wonder I have so few friends in real life if they all know my off-message thoughts.

How horrific to discover that people who know me have discovered what an opinionated fool I am.

For, in real life, I’m either the shy man in the corner who can barely string together a sentence, or the jester playing the fool.

How might this revelation change what and how I write?

Might it make me more careful and considered. Or ought I to be careful and considered anyway?

Well, of course, for I am sure there are many more lurkers of every kind, both friend and foe.

Like any other, I am a man of opposites. Sometimes, my ego wants to be known and acknowledged.

That was often my default state in the early years as a blogger seeking an audience.

I carried on that way for the first five years, until I realised nobody was at all interested.

And there began my golden era: as others slipped away to Facebook and then Twitter, I discovered a new freedom.

The freedom to write without an audience. To write and not be read. To write about whatever I wanted, safe in the knowledge that nobody cared.

Or so I thought. For while I believed all my readers had haemorrhaged away, leaving me to scatter my thoughts into the wind, it may not be so.

In truth, I have no idea who reads my blog, except one or two who occasionally leave a comment or like a post.

As for numbers, I imagine one or two, or no one at all, other than bots and marketers.

Where once I sought to be known, the idea of an audience now scares me. Even more so an audience that might know me.

I have always been grateful for that sincere supplication seemingly answered…

May God preserve us from fame, celebrity and great acclaim.

The Narcissist

I seek refuge in my obscurity. It’s why I had hoped to have become an anonymous soul wittering away only to myself and strangers.

Of course, if I truly wanted to vanquish my ego, I would take my blog offline entirely. I would simply pour my thoughts into a closed journal instead.

But as everyone knows by now, I am no pious sage. I am every much the conceited fool I always was.

Thus do I return whenever I convince myself to disappear. Thus does that compulsion to write undermine me whenever I tell myself to write no more.

By now, I no longer know why I write in public this way.

Is it my wayward ego still clamouring for attention, an innate exploration of self, or simple a love affair with the written word?

Even I do not know. All I know is that I have a hyperactive brain that seeks to release every thought, but a tongue which rarely submits.

The outlet of a quiet man. Who knows, perhaps that’s why the lurkers lurk: to understand the quiet man who rarely said a word.