On the face of it, there do not appear to be many parallels between being a sex blogger and a secret service agent. However, there is one key similarity: maintaining anonymity at all times and thus leading a double life.

For Girl On The Net, remaining anonymous is a constant source of consternation, angst and exhaustion. From using a burner phone which can’t be traced, to fastidiously wiping the internal location data for every photo she uploads, to keeping her job a secret from friends and relatives, there is the always omnipresent, never shakeable fear that someone is going to come along and uncover her identity.

The 24 hour task of maintaining anonymity has had a knock-on effect on GOTN's mental health. After her panic attacks became daily occurrences and her anxiety became unmanageable, the stress eventually culminated in a breakdown.

Set up in 2011, GOTN is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, sex blog in the UK. Based on her real life experiences, the site covers everything from funny anecdotes to her own personal sexual idiosyncrasies to polemics against the government’s sex education policy. It is an antidote to the woman’s rag brand of sex advice and there are no listicles titled “The ten best ways to please your man in the bedroom”.

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But how did the 30-year-old writer fall into sex blogging in the first place? While other demure students were leaving university to be herded into run-of-the-mill, distinctly un-sensual KPMG grad schemes, she decided to try her hand at online erotica. At the time, sex-blogging was in its infancy.

“They say write about what you love and I love sex,” she tells The Independent over the phone as she is not keen to meet up in person. “At university, me and my boyfriend floated the idea of writing a blog together. We did a couple of test posts but never put them online because he was a little bit nervous.”

However after the relationship ended, she plucked up the courage to start posting the blogs online, only hampered by the condition of keeping him and his sexual preferences anonymous.

Since then, anonymity has been an issue GOTN has faced on a daily basis. After all, the fear of being exposed is a real one: household name sex blogger Belle De Jour was forced to reveal her true identity back in 2009 after a tabloid discovered her real name and address.

This poses the question of why she decided to be anonymous in the first place. Her answer is unsurprising. “It’s partly because some of the messages I get from people are scary and also partly because I have elderly grandparents who probably would not want to hear that exact detail of how I like being shagged”.

The messages range from “super fan guys” declaring that they want to have sex with her to graphic photos with no written messages at all.

But another key reason GOTN chose to remain anonymous was the fact she had a day job which was very strict with their social media policy. “If you were caught doing anything that would bring the company into disrepute then they could fire you.”

(Girl On The Net (Girl On The Net)

Since then the task of maintaining anonymity has remained a daily grind. “It is hard,” she admits. “If you look at the main problems with anonymity, the number one is data. These days with pretty much everything you do, all the data is going to be linked - if you use an email address for Facebook - it’s going to then link you with other people who have emailed you at that address.”

In turn she is forced to ensure she keeps everything separate, always using a different phone and laptop for GOTN and her personal affairs. She jokes that at times it can almost feel like being a drug dealer and even calls her GOTN phone her “burner phone”. But her precautions have not always been full proof. She has had a couple of people mine the data from her blog photos to decipher the geographical location it was taken. Fortunately she has always been in hotels rather than at home at the time of the photos being taken.

On a more personal level, she says there is the issue of keeping the blog and her job a secret from friends and relatives and perpetually taking measures to ensure she has not revealed the identity of her boyfriend or past sexual partners.

As such, she says running the blog can feel like living a literal double life. “It’s exhausting because it involves having to constantly think about it”.

It was while juggling her job and the blog that things finally came to a head and culminated in a mental breakdown. Unable to talk about what she did outside of work because it was running the blog, she found herself isolated. She wound up taking a couple of weeks off sick and eventually handing in her notice.

“I used to tell myself, as I grew more and more anxious, that it was just normal to be constantly on edge,” she says. “When I'd have a panic attack, I just assumed that's what busy people like me did. I juggled lots of stuff, always felt like I was about to die, and had to keep running to the bathroom to go and vomit when I got too stressed. But that was normal - that's what I thought.”

However when it got to the point not a day went by without a panic attack, she knew things had gone too far. “At times I was wanting to die just so I could have a rest. I started struggling to get out of bed and finding I had to dare myself to do the simplest things. Then, one day, I went to a doctor. And it wasn't until I broke down in the doctor's office and she told me ‘you're ill’ that I finally realised this wasn't actually normal.”

She was put on anti-depressants but not warned about their sexual side effects. “My doctor didn’t warn me the pills might make it harder to orgasm," she recalled sounding audibly angered. "I’m a sex blogger that’s my raison d’etre".

While she says it is impossible to ever truly know what caused her breakdown and it was a range of complex interlocking factors, she says the constant pressure to maintain anonymity certainly has not helped.

As for her anxiety now, while it is by no means cured and continues to fluctuate, she is better than she was. Nevertheless the fears around anonymity linger on. She might agree to meet a PR on a good day but have a change of heart when the day arrives. “I’ll be due to meet them but I’ll have a huge panic and say this is awful, what if they take a photo of me?” she explains.

“It always will be a struggle and I do just have times where it all gets too much. Twitter gets too much or the comments get too much and I have to switch off for a day or two and try and relax.”

Another massive burden is keeping the blog a secret from people close to her. While most of her closest friends know what she does, they don’t necessarily know much else and won’t know her actual blog name. “I try and give people as little information as possible because it puts them in an awkward position as they might have to lie for me,” she says.

Some of GOTN’s closest calls to being exposed have come from friends inadvertently spilling the beans after drinking too much. And then there’s the added dilemma of her parents. While her dad knows her vocation, he does not know her blog name. Her mum knows both but under one important condition that she reads none of it and GOTN’s two published books remain unopened.

“She doesn’t want to read the detail of me getting shagged but she does want to do that proud mum thing of ‘oooh my daughter wrote a book’”.

Running the blog has not just given her mum something to be proud about, it has also given herself a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

The hugely popular site (it’s the first thing which comes up when you type sex blog into Google) has been profoundly influenced by her feminism. In fact, GOTN sees sex writing as “fun propaganda” to draw people in who might never have stumbled across feminist ideas.

“Some people will come to my blog for the feminism and politics and will stay for the porn, others will enter the blog via some really filthy post and will click on ‘Is it feminist to give blowjobs’ which goes into a big detailed discussion on the impact of feminism and sex.”

While 40 per cent of the site’s visitors are men, 60 per cent are women. This is perhaps surprising given it is often assumed only women are into what she describes as “word porn”.

As you would imagine GOTN is wary of much mainstream sex advice. But one particular article stands out for her. “It was called something like the 27 things women wish men would stop doing in bed,” she says. “One of the things was: ‘We hate it when they try and stick in our arse we’ve said no’. That is not a comedy line that is rape.”

She is also wary of the natural, unthinking parallels which society often draws between sex and love and the assumption that they are one of the same.

“Obviously sex can often be enhanced by being in love but so can cooking someone a delicious meal,” she reflects. “There is something really special about cooking for someone you’re in love with and that is a more pleasurable experience than cooking dinner for your mate Clive that you don’t even like that much.”