I liked this post of Sam's so much I'm reposting it here:

I was confusing online conversations with real conversations (comments to post--6.15.2004). I was feeling attacked. I was feeling extraordinarily guilty about this blog. It's something I've been complimented on and something I take some pride in. But it's a secret. It's essentially the only secret I keep from A.

I don't feel guilty about feeling the feelings I feel (feely feel feel feel) because I can sense the extent to which they matter. If I change moods, the past feelings are forgotten and I move on to new perspectives. And though I recognize them as my own, their recording in this blog has given those fleeting ruminations a weight and permanency they didn't contain when expressed. It's fine to have feelings, but dangerous to express them. Saying stuff you think you think will often end up biting you in the ass. While feelings themselves are wisped away in an instant, once they're expressed, the dark mood is concretized. Now it has it's own life. Even assuming the statement is correctly interpreted, the person who witnessed expression of your dark thoughts has no mechanism for assigning the statement a relative weight--no ability to replace one fleeting sentiment with another. It's a dark, lonely world outside of our heads. I live in complete ignorance of everyone. Nobody knows anybody. The more I say, the more wrong you are about me. But we still judge. And I still care.

I was feeling attacked and guilty and I needed to talk about it. All I could think about was the blog. But it's a secret. I wanted A to force it out of me. She pried appropriately. But I was aware that the more she knew, the more wrong she would be about how I feel. So I told lies that touched on the truth. ...

This fucking life.

Wouldn't it be such a great life if we had telepathy and could convey all the nuances and fickleness of our feelings to the other person? It would be so liberating to be able to pour out all our emotions to other people. But I find that with the people who are closest to me, even significant others, I really don't convey more than 50% of what I'm feeling. When R kept asking why I didn't want to visit him anymore, I wrote out a long essay on my secretgiggle.com blog about how I felt there was a power imbalance with him being the rejector and me the rejectee. I contemplated sending it but a friend helped change my mind by asking 'What would you gain?'

I would have merely traded the satisfaction of being understood with a newfound awkwardness in the relationship. Around the same time I wanted to tell my mom how much she hurt me. But that would have made her angry, meaning no free food for me. She would have interpreted it as meaning her whole career of motherhood has been a failure. And right now there are so many emotions and thoughts I filter out when I talk to H. He always asks me what I'm thinking and 90% of the time I can't tell him because it would take a lot of processing and editing to make it acceptable for him to hear. I can't tell him I like his touch because I don't want to give the impression I'm falling head over heals for him. I can't tell him I'm still open to the idea of an open relationship, because I don't want to push him away.

At the expense of not conveying our true emotions, and because we can't possibly express the depth and contingent factors of each emotion, we give share only enough to manipulate people and situations to create a desired outcome. To find a 'soulmate' whereby you can express 90% of your emotions with no fear of misunderstanding must be a pretty phenomenal situation. Would require *so* much understanding, trust and security. Is something I think I might have seen, but only rarely, in a couple.