Is anyone listening?

For a writer, the only thing worse than the fear of having nothing to say is the fear that no one will care to read it if you did. So why do writers write? I suppose some never care whether others read them. Perhaps many just assume someone will. But for me, there seems to be something singularly cathartic about writing. Call them demons or ghosts, genius or insanity, writing is the only thing that relieves them. It's a blood-letting of sorts; a way to get the thoughts out before they do any real damage to my psyche. So writing becomes a necessity, regardless of consequence. Caring whether anyone reads it is, well, simply wanting to find some validity in my thoughts. Getting them out of my head is just not enough; I need to validate their having existed at all. Otherwise, I feel more and more isolated, different, and alone.
I opened this blog almost a month ago. I'm just now posting the inaugural message. This is, in fact, my first blog ever. I'm hoping to move these thoughts from my brain into the collective brain that is the internet: a wildly diverse, complicated, strange, and utterly incomprehensible collection of everyone's inner minds. Perhaps, if they find an audience in the larger mind, they won't seem so ridiculous for having been in mine. But, at last, the procrastination in starting was a symptom of the worst of all these thoughts: the fear of being alone in a room full of people.