#meanwhile on LinkedIn I'm still immediately suspicious of any requests or contact like

[laurelindebear]

So ya girl (and some other staff) are in the local paper as well as having been on BBC radio a month or so ago. It's...interesting. OTOH the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known and all that, and on the other the satisfaction of actually being recognised for something I'm doing, with my name and everything, and not being an invisible hand, an imperceptible agent of administration and bureaucracy and all the fiddly little paperwork things that nobody but archivists cares about until Things stop working how they ought.

Above it all, the sheer weirdness and incomprehensibility of the idea that anyone would know who I am or give a damn what I think, about anything. Even to myself, I feel like I'm functionally a non-entity, you know? Like I barely exist. I have no idea how many times I've thought, if I disappeared, who would notice? So it's novel and exciting and really a bit terrifying to suddenly have a footprint and a voice, or something.

I think I thought I was gonna be a real Somebody, when I was young and stupid, but it's been a long, long time since then. I can't remember when it stopped; all I know is that younger version of me feels like another person and another life. I'm never going to be the kind of Nobel-Prize-winning legend I aspired to be as a child (I mean, seriously, what was I on), but it feels like I'm skirting the line from Nobody into Somebody and man alive is it freaky.