Private or Paranoid?

I've realized recently that I'm a private person. I keep certain things to myself and don't like people invading my space. However, I'm realizing that perhaps my private-ness is going a little past private and dangerously close to paranoia. People – normal people, I guess – usually are pretty open about things and about their problems and about what's going on in their lives. Not me. I've always kept my own things to myself and only talk about safe things to other people.

One of the reasons I started this blog is to get some of those things out of my head and out there for people to see. I've talked about some things but everything has been safe: a little humor, a little emotion, a little sarcasm, a little dementia. There are still things up in my melon that I will probably never write or talk about. I can accept that but this has spilled over into other parts of my life and daily routine.

For example, I cannot stand it when people look over my shoulder looking at what I'm doing whether that is writing something down or looking at my computer screen. I don't really have anything to hide when I'm on the computer or if I'm reading or writing something it's just that what I'm doing is my business and not the business of other people. I'm seriously thinking about turning my desk around at work to make it hard for people to look at my monitors but I think that's going a little overboard. Sometimes if someone is coming into my office I'll switch my screen over to the desktop or something pretty generic so they have nothing to look at or start a conversation about. I figure if I want people to know what I'm doing and what I'm working on, I'll tell you.

I visit a few message boards regularly and I try to stay anonymous. In my profiles on these boards I don't put any information about myself. I stick to my username and that's it. I don't want people finding out anything about me. One time I wanted to flame someone on a board so I registered a new username and flamed him. I was still worried I'd be tracked down. Recently, I've been a little more open on message boards. I'll post my city, my instant messenger screen name, and sometimes a link to my web site.

I think I'm getting a little better about not being so private about myself but I think I was close to being paranoid that people were going to find about me and the inner stuff of my life. I'm still having a hard time with keeping some thoughts to myself and not talking to people about them. If I weren't so paranoid I'd probably write some of that stuff on here but I've chosen to make this public so I probably never will. The dilemma lives on. Am I just a private person or am I paranoid?