I’ve been battling my bloggy destiny for years. Instead, I maintained a livejournal that I refused to call a “blog,” and have been active on numerous social networking services. I thought of it as a way to talk to my friends about things I’m interested in. The shift to my own site and the WordPress platform has been a big deal. First, it’s a lot of work. (This is the main reason I’ve resisted it.) Setting the blog up the way I wanted it has involved a lot of techy fiddly stuff and communicating with my hosting service, etc. Second, the public exposure gives me pause. One of my LJ friends posted yesterday about fear of being in the middle of an internet crapstorm. I’ve been letting that fear limit my internet presence for a long time, and I guess I finally got tired. The Shawna Ahern post and its responses got me thinking, too. It makes me wonder if I should even further limit my son’s presence on my blog. It makes me wonder if it’s time to delist my phone number from the local directory, while I’m still obscure. And I wish I didn’t have to think about things like that. I wish I didn’t have to think about them more because I am female. But I’m not going to let that fear limit me anymore.

(Yeah, I probably will delist from the phone book, because if, someday, someone threatens to kill my cats, like they did to Seanan McGuire, or says they hope the pedophiles get my child, like they did to Shawna Ahern, I would not like to worry about how easy it is for them to find out where to go to make those things happen.)