Oh hey there.

Nice to meet you.  I'm Karen.  How's about a little introduction?

I'm 28 years old, living in the aptly-referred-to on our licence plates "Beautiful British Columbia", Canada.  I am married to my high school sweetheart, and we have a funny little cat.  I'm highly emotional, something I am working to reconcile.  I chew my nails.  I'm a bit of a hermit, not getting out of the house as much as I perhaps should.  I am a child in many ways.  I have green eyes that see the world through black thick-rimmed glasses. I'm the epitome of an introvert, and maybe just a bit neurotic.  Okay, maybe more than a bit.  I pick earthworms out of puddles and am afraid of the dark.  Books and blankets; these are a couple of my favorite things.  I've got such an intense empathy that sometimes it hurts.  

I'm not new to blogging.  I've been doing it for almost five years.  I have another blog (two, actually) that you'll likely never know.  But I'm new to this one.

I'm a recovering Facecrack addict, and want badly to get back into blogging.  But lately I feel restricted on my main blog.  Like I've gotta censor it.  I can't say fuck; no swearing at all.  I can't talk about my anxiety and depression and the fact that I've been in therapy or drinking or insecurities or strange thoughts or my someone recent experimentation with smoking pot.  I also can't talk about anyone that I know on my blog, because what if they see and they don't like it and they get upset?  How can I complain about someone if there's the chance that they might read it?   

For a while, my cousins and I had a secret blog.  We wrote things and shared things with each other that we never would have with the rest of our family.  It was a place we could yell and swear and tell dirty jokes and complain and not worry about the judgement or the talk that would inevitably happen, whether intentional or not.

But a year ago, I wrote a post about how pissed off and upset and hurt I was when, a couple days after my husband's best friend was killed by a drunk driver, a customer at work kept pressing me as to why I was "just okay" and told me to just smile and that it was all in my head.  I spent 15 minutes in the bathroom bawling on the shoulder of a lady whose name I still don't even know.  Might I also mention that I had recently just started going to therapy at this time?  And what happened?  I got fucking judged, in the one place where I felt safe.  Now, I can't post on it.  Can't comment.  I still check it periodically, though the posts have been pretty infrequent.  

Now, don't get me wrong, I love my family.  But there's some things right now that I don't want them to know.  Fuck, most of those things I listed up there?  Not even my parents know.  For a lot of reasons, I don't know when, or IF, I can tell them.  I'm also sure that my family, they don't always mean to be judgmental, but it happens, regardless.  One thing gets around, and it just keeps going and going, and soon it's being talked about in hushed tones at family gatherings, and then before you know it, my grandma has heard.

Maybe the brave thing to do would be to just write on my existing blog and accept the judgement, the thoughts, the behindthebacktalk.  But right now, I'm not sure I can be that brave.  I can handle the judgement of complete strangers (though I hope you'll keep reading and we'll be more than that), but not that of my family.  But right now, I'm much too insecure.  For the time being, this will have to suffice.