Discretion Is The Better Part of Valour

Picture found on http://weheartit.com/entry/21164566

Last night, I was leaving a rehearsal chatting to a friend of mine. There was a lull in the conversation when suddenly she turned to me and said 'Oh my God Eleanor, I love your blog!'

A year ago, this would have frightened me to death. It did, I wrote a post about it and everything. The frightening part was that people I knew in real life would be able to know things about me that I obviously hadn't told them, sad things, angry things. I kept thinking 'THEY ARE GOING TO KNOW EVERYTHING.' Now, I realise everything isn't actually everything, but it seemed like a lot, and it was. That was only four people, my own age, but I kept thinking 'What if they tell everyone? What if everyone reads my Musings? What if they laugh at me, what if they hate it, they'll know THINGS!'

My IT teacher just looked over my shoulder as I'm writing this post. Now she knows stuff. She didn't say anything though. She's looking at her computer now. Oh my God what if she's reading my blog right now?! Wait... ah no, it's blocked by the school's servers as a personal website. That's alright then.

I suppose my biggest problem was the lack of secrecy. I am quite a discreet person. I've gotten better since then, but mystery makes a person more interesting, right? Anyway. as my writing has matured, as I have matured, I've learned not to freak out over things as much (even though I still do), I don't whine or rant on Apostrophe, not about personal things, and I've learned to distinguish between being a real person behind this blog that people might be able to relate to and being too real, embarassingly personal. This isn't a reality programme.

Whenever someone brings up Apostrophe in public, whether it's someone I know to read it or a surprise, my heart always stops for a few seconds. Last night, it was a surprise, but I'm better at people knowing about the blog now, so my heart only stopped for one second. Old habits die hard...

It was during the last year that I got more comfortable with people knowing about Apostrophe, adults even. None of my family read it (I hope) but now it's a lot, lot more than four people. Now that my classmates are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon (please, I've been here since Second Year, people) they're starting to follow me. And if you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I link to the blog whenever I post something new, and the link is on my profile, so maybe it'll become a lot more public, and I hope I'm ready. I should be.

But back to last night -

'Oh my God Eleanor, I love your blog!'
*heart stutters* '...What? Really?'
'Yeah, it's so hilarious! I was talking to Bronagh last night and she told me about it so I looked it up, and it's so good!'
'Wow, thanks!'
'Yeah, it's brilliant Eleanor. Anyway, see you!'

And I walked on with a grin on my face, safe in the knowledge that I had already deleted the more embarrassing posts some months before.

Eleanor Roscuro