I've been blogging for 10 years. For about 6 I was very anonymous and then I became willing to share "Jen" and the region of the country I live in and my profession. I did that because I was tired of secrecy and knew a young boy who was newly diagnosed and I didn't want to contribute to him growing up needing the same secrecy. I just didn't take any big leaps since there are more Jens than anything else in people around my age.

I'll warn you that blogging sometimes will make you wonder what people have figured out. A few times someone from one of the teensy towns I worked in would land on my page and I'd start wondering if it were a co-worker. Once I wrote about a bad experience with a medical hospital and got some mean comments from someone living nearby. Another time I had what I believe was a pedophile trolling me for information/details about my history of sexual abuse. That was plain old creepy and after that person was told no more I got a bunch of hits from a porn site for a few days. I never looked to see why. But that was my own fault in that I fell for a sad story and talked more than I should have without vetting the person.

I am waiting to feel well enough to go through my blog and take down almost every post. I'm just done at this point, for no other reason than 10 years has let me say everything I needed to say.

But I guess I'm just thinking that both blogging and something like this forum are going to have the potential for weirdos to come along and you just have to be careful and make the best judgment calls you can. Although I did change my name to something harder to identify as me related to any other online name I've ever used I mostly worry less about privacy posting on here than on my blog, another reason it is coming down. I am afraid of things on the blog hurting someone I care about if they ever stumbled across it (highly unlikely but in the last year that's gotten harder to not write about some things that are not things I can discuss publicly). That's not the main reason but since I"m really not writing on it I'm taking it down to just blog privately from now on, leaving up some posts that have seemed to be more helpful than others based on statistics.

I hope you can make sense of this; I know what I'm trying to say (and partly that is to have some software that lets you track visits, like sitemeter) but I'm not saying it well. I've spent a really long time today sewing and following instructions is not my strong point at this moment. My brain is very tired.