Dearest blog: Web surfers spill their guts on Net

If ever you've felt the need to constantly count the syllables of your speech, or deconstruct your food before you eat it, or maybe had the fear that your life is really a secretly constructed reality show, ?la "The Truman Show," you are not alone.

All of these irrational habits are confessions of anonymous blog contributors, published on iamneurotic.com, a site dedicated to sharing obsessive tendencies and quirks.

Spun from the popularity of the blog comes the book edition: "i am neurotic (and so are you)," which includes highlights of the best blog contributions alongside photo illustrations.

And iamneurotic.com is just one of many blogs that allow Web surfers to spout off anonymously about their daily dilemmas and deepest desires.

Similar blogs — which have also gotten book deals — include the likes of PostSecret.com ("Extraordinary confessions from ordinary lives"), and FMyLife.com ("Get the guts to spill the beans").

The reason behind the secret-spilling blog phenomenon is up for debate, but UCLA student and iamneurotic.com creator Lilanna Kong said she has a few guesses.

"They [blog contributors] want to get things off their chest and lessen the burden of knowing they have these secrets," Kong said. "They share things they wouldn't normally share, and they don't have to reveal their identity, so they feel protected."

Still, Kong said, she started the blog with her friends not as a form of therapy but as a light-hearted joke that wasn't meant for anyone else to see.

But when another blogger came across the site and linked to it from his blog, traffic started coming in and reached a peak mid-2008.

Kong started posting submissions from other readers on the site, adding icons that let readers "heart" a particular post or say "me, too."

"The icons make it so people don't feel so alone in their neurosis or feel unique and special," Kong said.

She said the site isn't meant to cure anyone's neurotic habits, but it seems to give people peace of mind that there are other people out there with similar habits.

"I'm not a psychologist, but I think if someone has a neurosis that isn't detrimental to his way of life, it's not a terrible thing," Kong said. "They make us different. They are practices that help us get through the day, in a way."

As for people who have detrimental, diagnosed psychiatric disorders, the Internet still seems to be a safe haven — though not necessarily via confessional sites like "i am neurotic," said psychiatrist Fred Rymer.

Rymer, who works in the psychiatry department at the University of Utah, said he has never had a patient use any of the aforementioned sites, but many of his otherwise socially phobic patients "do fine with the Internet."