At the Gallery yesterday, hilarityallen complained that I hadn't written much in this diary recently. So I had a think about why I hadn't, and noticed a sort of a recurring theme, which is that I'm cautious about people asking me about it.

It used to be reasonably common that I'd write really cryptic things in my (then solely Monochrome-based) diary. Sometimes these were in plain but uninformative English (‘That was somewhat unexpected, but undeniably pleasant. I wonder if it will have any future effects?’ might be a typical example), and sometimes they took the slightly more artistic form of opaque dialogues between fictitious supernatural beings which were a complex metaphor for bits of my psyche, but usually they meant a lot more to me than most of the people reading them, and were there more for the therapeutic effect of writing them than for the enlightenment of the readers.

Then again, some years ago I went through a period of paranoia and panic attacks, and would react very badly if particular people wrote anything at all in their diaries that made me think they knew something I didn't. And since then I've always felt slightly guilty about doing this sort of cryptic thing, because it doesn't seem quite fair to hint to lots of people that there are things they don't know and that you're not going to tell them!

Perhaps it's also because the people I know now are more direct and curious about things. A few years ago, if I'd written a diary entry suggesting there was some gossip, people would have taken the implied hint that if I hadn't given details then it was because I didn't intend to; of course they might still feel it was worth asking me in private in case I was prepared to tell them something I wouldn't have told my whole potential readership, but in practice people didn't seem to do this very often, and when they did it tended to be justified. These days, on the rare occasions I've posted something that piques someone's curiosity, I tend to get too many questions about it, some of them in public LiveJournal comments (meaning that anyone who could see the original entry could see my answer if I gave one, which was surely the whole point of me not giving details there in the first place?).

The result of this is that I tend to not even bother hinting any more, because it's more trouble than it's worth; which means the people who pry have actually been counterproductive and caused my net information output to drop. Accordingly, when the most interesting thing that happened to me in a given week is of this type, I will just shut up for the whole week and then people complain at me for not writing stuff…

Suppose you have a general tendency to be irrationally terrified of a particular class of thing. Suppose a new specific example of such a thing appears on the horizon.

Is it healthy, I wonder, to avoid even looking at it for fear that you'll be terrified out of your wits? It doesn't sound healthy on the face of it; but it occurs to me that it has one rather encouraging implication, which is that at least at a conscious level you think being reduced to a gibbering jelly for a week at a time by your unreasoning terror is actually more worrying than the thing itself. Which is sort of good news in terms of how bad your unreasoning terror actually is – if it can't override your perfectly reasonable dread of things you've actually had happen to you before, it can't be all that bad.

Of course, on the minus side it might be that the thing turns out to not be nearly as scary as you'd thought, and that you might spend some time failing to find this out in the course of avoiding hearing anything about it. Then you feel silly…