I don’t know why I’m so nervous. Just hit publish. Do it. Doitdoitdoit. Ugh. Unfortunately when I get nervous, I get the nervous shits. I’ve been dealing with these since 2003, and it gets…bad. Who knew there were so many different types of nervous? We got the nervous-nervous, the happy-nervous, the excited-nervous, the sick-to-your-stomach nervous, the sad-nervous, the angry-nervous, the I’m-about-to-do-something-stupid-nervous, the I-just-did-something-super-stupid-nervous…

So here I sit in the coffee shop with something between the nervous-nervous and the excited-nervous brewing in my belly, and I can’t hit publish out of fear of having to immediately run to the bathroom. It’s one of those single toilet situations, which is great for privacy, but horrible when you really have to go and rush to the door just to find it locked, or worse, you do your business in private while imaging the giant line forming outside in the public, knowing that every single person in the line is about to know what you did, and there’s no other stall to blame it on.

Yes, there is a certain level of anonymity on the internet, but that’s the part that scares me. People are mean. And the internet makes it possible to be meaner without worrying about facing the person you’re being a dick to, pretty much ever. It opens up a weird porthole to confidence people didn’t even know they had, which sometimes opens up the inner nasty they’ve been waiting to unleash. Some people definitely take pleasure in ripping people apart in the virtual world. I’m not specifically terrified of being ripped apart, though the people who take pleasure in that do terrify me; it’s more of a generic all-encompassing fear. I’m not afraid people won’t read this, I am afraid they will.

I’ve been furiously scribbling in a journal since 3^rd grade. I can tell you everything I did, everything I wore, everything I ate, every boy who so much as LOOKED at me, from 1988-2000. Ran into a bit of a problem documenting my college years; drinking, partying and making poor life choices consumed the majority of my free time. I’m convinced these three things serve as the main purpose for higher education, society’s attempt to flush the idiot out of you before entering the real world. Anyway, I’ve been struggling to pick it up ever since.

But I have tried, with each attempt ending the same: I was lying to myself. On paper. My hand would write things, my eyes would stare at the half-truths on the page in disbelief, wondering what the fuck was wrong with my hand. What was I trying to do, rewrite history? It was like my hand thought my actual feelings and experiences were too stupid, too weird, too embarrassing to document. Because that? That would make them real. So I just started keeping my thoughts and experiences upstairs, safe in my tiny secret garden of a brain. Which eventually became like that time I tried to stuff my 32-year-old self into my 22-year-old jeans. I needed to find a new home for 10 years of acquired body.

And so, the other fork in the road was born from the collective droppings of my overstuffed mind, but it was not alive. Each day I clicked on the home page on my corner of the internet just to see the bold words Nothing Found scream, hey YOU, this thing isn’t going to write itself. Days turned to weeks and weeks to months. Months could turn into years. I try to avoid nervous poo-creating activities as much as possible, but I realize I have to start somewhere, even if my somewhere is as pointless at this. I don’t know if this will fix anything. I don’t even know what’s broken. But it’s worth a shot.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I need to find a toilet.