Over Exposed? : pixeldiva

Okay, I know it's a week later, and also not Monday, but I've been busy, and tired, and not really able to collect my thoughts about my weekend away into anything coherent, other that it was wet. Very wet. Miserably wet. But the less said about that the better.

So I've been trying to find the words and the energy to write, and now I'm wondering if I should.

This afternoon something very odd happened.

I got an email from a colleague. It contained a url, and two lines of text. The url was a page from my journal and the text said something to the effect of "I found this on the web" and "hmmm... very interesting".

I suddenly felt sick.

"Yes? What about it?" I immediately shot back.

"Just like I said... very interesting" came the reply.

"why interesting? and how did you find it?" went my reply.

"I was looking for domains and I found it" came the reply.... and I smelled a rat.

First off. He's a guy. A fairly big and burly guy. Who is highly unlikely to type "pixeldiva" in as a domain to look for.

A quick check of my stats confirms my suspicions. The referrer to the page he sent me came from a google search. The search term? My name.

Sure, he was probably bored, and curious... but why would he lie about it?

Before I start sounding like a paranoid nutcase. I'm not. It just creeps me out more than a little. I know it's up on the web, and therefore public. But it's not exactly easy to find unless you're specifically looking for me, or the condition I have, or the various utterly gross things vaguley related that people search for that I don't want to know why they're looking.

So, I head over the road to the other building to have a wee chat. I figure if the's that curious about my websites, he could have just asked. Or if he was curious about what was wrong with me, he could have asked that too.

Most of all, I'm utterly creeped out by someone I hardly know, who I work with, reading the most personal details of one of the worst periods in my life.

I know I made the decision to make it public, but I did it in the hope that expressing my feelings about what was happening would let me get it out of my system and stop me boring the arse off all my friends by whinging about it, and secondly, help anyone who was feeling the same way, and felt like they were the only one... and so far, it's served it's purpose. I still get emails from people who are just finding out their diagnosis and find my site something of an oasis in a desert full of the most dry medical information.

So while that still happens, I want to leave the site up there, but things like this make me want to immediately tear it down and crawl back into my little hole. I've already moved my writing, and cut the personal stuff waaaaay back because a colleague at my previous job (who also happens to be my sister's boyfriend) took the url into work with him, and I didn't feel comfortable writing there any more.

I had quite a long chat with this guy this afternoon, and at first he was very defensive about how he found it... and stuck to his guns about domain hunting, which I know is a lie. I don't know if my explaining why I feel a bit sensitive about it, and why I'd rather it didn't get sent round the office has had the intended effect, or whether my talking to him made him decide to send it round, when he hadn't been intending to.

I just don't know. I don't know whether I want to tear it down and hide, or whether I need to get through this feeling, and stand tall, and proud, and ignore the sick feeling in my stomach and the feeling like I've turned up and work and forgot to get dressed.

If this is even a little of what it feels like to be famous, or even popular, then you can keep it. I'd rather stay in the background.

Over Exposed?

Left comments

Leave a comment

pixeldiva is...

reading

archived

elsewhere