The other half of the rant . . .

. . . had to do with friendship and boundaries, and per usual, my thoughts are coming partly from my book and partly from real life.

There's a line in my novel that sticks in my head. My main character's estranged from her childhood best friend, and when she sees her again, she thinks, "There is not a single person on this planet who gets to know my everything anymore."

That is lonely.

But it's also pretty normal I think for adults. It's easy to get jealous of the openness between really good couples, but even for people in relationships, the older you get before finding each other, or the farther apart you grow after finding each other, the more likely this is to be true.

So there's the fantasy of grabbing a friend (or a blog) and sharing everything -- oversharing. It is tempting and fearful and almost always a bad idea.

An alternative is to share a little bit with a lot of different people -- different secrets for the different people who can handle them. That works, but it makes me feel stretched out, transparent, like I'm forgetting where I put all the little pieces of myself. I might lose some, or a couple of the pieces will snap together without me knowing, start running around doing damage, Bonnie and Clyde style.

We need a little bit of that freedom with someone, even a stranger. It's worth feeling transparent or losing a bit here and there -- otherwise, we explode.