Last year, I started two blogs with email lists. I first started one and labeled it my main blog. I shared it with everyone I knew, and I told them I’d be sending a weekly email. I kept the writing regular and predictable and safe. Every week I sent out a post that was a collection of five short factoids, the kind you’d find at the back of a notebook when the publisher didn’t know how to fill space. People seemed to like it, some people seemed to comment, and some wrote to me expressing that they were finding it fun. But there was a secret I was holding back. Every time I wrote a post, I was conscious of my audience. I knew exactly who was reading it, and these readers were perched on the branches of my mind like cartoonish vultures, peering over my shoulders at each sentence I wrote. “How irreverent,” one would whisper, “how needlessly snarky and cruel.” Another would tsk tsk at the choice of words in a sentence. “That is so not you. It’s a performative flourish, completely inauthentic.” Another would be offended that I inserted a personal anecdote, a joke that was meant only for me. I was writing in the solitude of my room, but with an entire editing team in my brain.

Is this what the Greeks felt before the breakdown of the bicameral mind?

So I started another blog. This one was my garbage blog, my secret blog that nobody had access to, that was for my edification alone. I could write whatever I wanted here and there was nobody to censor me. It was my playground, and I played. I wrote unhinged rants here, pieces with no predefined structure, stories based on characters from my life comfortable in the knowledge that those characters would not stumble on these pages. And all was well. For a while.

But eventually, I made some things here that I was proud of. I wanted other people to see them. I wanted to bask in the sunshine of their adoration. And I announced the existence of my garbage blog one day to all the readers of my main blog. Just the one time. Or maybe twice. And a couple of people trickled in. And a few more. People I recognized, whom I cared for, whose opinion mattered to me. They seemed to like what I wrote on my garbage blog more than what I wrote on my main blog. They wrote to me more often. They talked to me about the stories I wrote. And I was happy. But I could also feel what was happening to my writing. The vultures in my mind were returning home to roost, editing the sentences on the page. My garbage blog was turning into my main blog. Conscious that some people I liked very much were reading the blog, my writing hand started to curb itself like a possessed object with its own will. Coded messages entered the articles I wrote, inserting inside jokes and references, with the curiosity to see if the person I targeted would respond to them. And very soon, my joy at writing this “garbage blog” turned into revulsion, conscious of every bit of performance that was creeping in. The last straw was when somebody I respected a lot, a public intellectual, something of a celebrity in the blogosphere, subscribed to my blog. I was overjoyed — for exactly two minutes. Then I became obsessed with making sure that the next post I wrote would be worthy of their gaze. What if they read the dross I wrote and decided to unsubscribe from my mailing list? Would my poor heart be able to take it?

I don’t blame myself for this oscillation. There’s a part of me that wants to express itself in its raw, unfiltered truthfulness, to say what it means. And that part wants to be seen. But there’s also another part that fears the possibility of being seen and rejected. It considers rejection as a judgment of its identity, not of the eye of the observer or of the thing being presented. The things I put out into the world seem to live a life of their own, and when they are pricked like voodoo dolls, I feel a twinge of pain. The oscillation comes with an incessant bargaining with myself: An assertion that I do not need to hide myself this time, that I can say what I wish to with uninhibited boldness, and deal with the consequences. I’m a big boy after all. But that resolution always tends to crumble, because it’s been a recurring story with every blog I started. And more broadly speaking, every personal artistic project that I create.

So this time, I’m going to keep this blog secret for as long as I can. Part of me debated whether naming it after myself and giving out my email address was a good idea. But that part is okay. I do want to put out things in my name. I just want to not voluntarily show it to people, until I’m ready. Meanwhile, these pages will live on the Internet on their own.