One of the strangest things about my blogging experience is the fact that my close friends and family members seem to be learning about me from what they read here.

The internet can assume it knows all or knows nothing about who I actually am and what I go through, but I’m consistently surprised by what the people who actually know me… well, didn’t know.

How did I miss telling you about that? How did I manage to keep that to myself?

Wasn’t all of it obvious? Couldn’t you read that on my face?

No.

I can never figure out if my reticence is a quirk of the introverted side of my character, or a function of bad relationship scars I’ve sustained over the years. And the latter always makes me roll my eyes at myself. Letting your scars define you always sounds so self-indulgent and Garbo-esque.

But there it is.

Once burned, twice shy, I guess?

I think my struggle with infertility has made this strange disconnect more obvious to me in the last year. I’ll get emails or phone calls from people I talk to regularly saying, “I had no idea you were having such a hard time with that, ” or “Why didn’t you tell me that was so difficult for you?” after reading one of my entries.

And I don’t know what to say to that. How would I bring it up in conversation? How would I talk about it without being a downer? How do you dredge topics up in conversation when what you’re going through is in direct opposition to the experiences of the other person… and might make them feel strange? How do you communicate something hard and not feel the need to rush in and say, “But I’m fine, I’m fine. I swear, I’m fine.”

It’s the most awkward topic in the universe to me at times, too, because it combines the utter weirdness of speaking about one’s girl parts with the idea of grieving. Grieving girl parts.

Yeah. Not something that usually goes nicely with a latte, especially when the other person is bouncing a baby on their knee.

Or is, you know… a guy. Who has no girl parts.

Here, I can flesh things out and clear my head and say everything that needs to be said right then, and no one presses me for more or wonders later about the look in my eyes or feels guilty that they couldn’t relate to what I was going through at all. They don’t have to say anything back. They don’t even have to read it if they don’t want to. They can choose to know, or choose to keep some distance.

It does make me a bit of a chicken. Or a big chicken. But it’s a start, and it feels good.

There isn’t a place in my life beyond a small circle of friends and family where everything comes out. And even with those people, I tend to work out the deepest things in the deepest parts of myself, where my thoughts don’t bounce off one other like echoes in a canyon.

I guess to most people — people who can talk about something serious without stumbling madly over their words — it seems impossibly complicated or indulgent to feel your way through life like this.

But the more I write, the more I feel comfortable about bringing my thoughts into the light.

Maybe I’ll learn to do it out loud, eventually.