Numbers are driving me bonkers, buzzing like pillow-flies, corroding my calm.

This has happened before. In business, budgets and p and l’s bedeviled me. (I shudder even to type p and l – pain and lamentation!) Match scores ricocheted in recollection when I played tennis. Bank balances sometimes bothered: too few funds for what I hoped to achieve.

In retirement, numbers pestered less. Age, yes – but what could I do about it? – and grandchildren’s birthdays, but fewer digits flicking consciousness like a buggy whip, quickening my trot.

Until now.

The numbers in question are the statistics generated by the words you’re reading.

For a decade they grew gradually as a stalagmite. I made some new friends, lost others to death, some drifted away, others stomped off in a huff. Change so slow feels like permanence, as with a mirrored face.

Three months ago, we commenced an experiment to see how many more might enjoy these missives if they knew about them. Today after a modest investment in Facebook advertising, I have eight times as many subscribers as in May, and a comparable increase in pageviews, as new subscribers stream in like immigrants to Ellis Island when they were still welcome in America.

I observe spellbound, spooked, like Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Jack gawking at his wondrous beanstalk. What’s going on here! I used to know my readers from long familiarity, many face-to-face. Now, each morning, I address mostly newcomers. What do my recent arrivals expect? What might you enjoy? The contest for online attention is cut-throat: one strike and you’re out. “You only have one chance to make a first impression,” a parent sing-songed. This may be my only chance – yikes! Only masochists delight in deletes.

This missive is not a disguised boast. Am I glad to be welcomed into so many inboxes? You bet: writers write to be read. But how many of these newcomers will ripen into old-timers, regulars committed to our colloquy? A casual reader I account a failure: a potential close chum I failed to secure. Love is not now and then but as frequently as possible. With audacious avidity, I harvest hearts.

What interests me about this moment is my dread. A “nice problem to have” is still a problem. Why am I not giddy about this lottery win? Because, for starters, I don’t trust it. I fear I’ve been swooped up like a mollusk by a gull, only to be smashed onto the rocks and eaten.

Then there’s the dread of change. I was happy where I was, with my cozy coterie crowding into our corner in almost conspiratorial secret. We fortified one another like a secret sodality.

Now, daily, my utterances grow more public and thus, inevitably, less intimate. The more listeners, the less license – to wink, whisper, sigh. I write to you-singular not you-plural. More visible, I must “watch my words,” especially in this eerie era when the Nameless One might be listening.

Anonymity is a happy haven where we might cavort as we please. Emily Dickinson would have welcomed readers – she made a few timid attempts to gain some – but did she rue her seclusion? Her originality – and, thus, her posterity – were made possible by her invisibility. Her weirdness would have been bleached away by her urge to ingratiate her neighbors. A proper, even starchy matron, what horror if the tattling tea-takers, reading her poems, judged her nuts. They might have locked her up!

Change traumatizes because it slams the door on yesterday, which we may have cherished. The bride can’t be a maiden again, the stallion a colt. That’s scary.