I’ve felt this before.

Felt like I’m self-censoring, wondering what you were thinking when you read about my weekend, wondering if I should say this or that, wondering how you’d take it.

The “You” I’m referring to has changed with time, but there usually is someone who’s like a silent backseat driver, a consideration that is unwanted yet remains present. I’ve wondered before about how honest I should be in my entries, wondering if it was a liability to my work, my life, and even my friendships. Yet this is different. This is personal. This involves my heart.

I’ve said before that I write for myself, yet it’s often what I DON’T write that is for you. There are some arenas, some hurts, some situations in my life that I won’t delve into out of respect for privacy and personal information. While my life is often an open book, there’s some pages torn out, hidden away in the secret vestibules of my mind. As my friend Sarah often says, people read our sites and think they know us, think they understand all about us, think they GET us. But there’s more – so much more – that we keep and save and withhold. And it’s those very unallowances that say more about the true ‘us’ than any entry on any website in the whole gigantic World Wide INTERweb can.

The balance between public and private is all-the-more intensified by the advances of Google, and other [less-robust and truly inadequate when compared to Google] search engines. No longer does any private information really remain private; with the ‘cache’ feature, anything that was ever online can (and often will) remain for posterity. Be careful what you write, do, and videotape, my friends.

And yet that isn’t my first nor a major consideration when tailoring these entries to my liking. I try and be meticulous in my word choice, attempting to choose the perfect word to evoke the feeling of ennui, distaste, predilection or abhorrence that I’m feeling at the time. The consideration is you.

This seems like an injustice to me, that your quasi-omniscience isn’t fair. With my proclivity to withhold some aforementioned information with respect to privacy, the very fact that I’m tempted to withhold other information because of you both angers and pains me. You shouldn’t have this – or any – power over me.

And you do. I want you gone. I want your presence to disappear just as your reality did, instantly, quickly, overnight. I’ve eliminated you from all other aspects of my life, and still your shadow remains on my most precious of arenas, my writing.

Maybe I should call a priest. I want you exorcised.