THE TRUTH? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

I really debated over whether to share this or not, but in the end, opted for painful honesty.  You see, I have a problem with my blog. Not long after I got active on facebook, I started putting links to all my blog posts there, which really made my numbers jump, and they've been climbing slowly but steadily ever since. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when they took an unexpected plunge.  Not long after, my friend Paula emailed me to ask why I hadn't written any blog posts lately. I told her I was still writing every day, and there must be something wrong with her iphone. But then another asked, and another. Finally it was clear that my post links had just stopped appearing on facebook. Aha! That could explain the dip in numbers, which made me feel much better. Good ol' facebook, broken again! I thought surely things would be back to normal in a day or two, but no, apparently not.

So, when my son the computer-geek was here recently, I consulted him. He said "Well, it's possible that, if not enough people were interacting with your posts, leaving comments and 'liking' them and such, facebook might have arbitrarily labeled you as a spammer and made your links disappear, without bothering to tell you about it, so you wouldn't just go out and start spamming everyone again under a new blog name." Wow. That hurt. Talk about knocking the wind out of a girl's sails, turning her whole universe upside down. Yes, I am fully aware of how pathetic that reaction sounds, but we opted for painful honesty today, remember?


I'm still not even certain that's what happened, but the mere possibility that it could've had me questioning everything -- the value of my blog, my capabilities as a writer, the connections I thought I had made in the blogosphere, my worth as a human being...ok, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch, but still. The big question was, had my blog run it's course? I'm coming up on my five-year blogiversary, and that's a pretty long life in blog years. Do I have anything left to say? What will I do with my time if I quit blogging -- if I no longer have any reason to spend every waking moment thinking up ideas for new posts, and coming up with photos to go with them? Who will I be if I'm not a blogger or a writer? How depressed would I get if I pulled the plug?

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Well, judging from the fact that 24 hours later, I was still sitting in my nest stewing, I'd say the answer is "Pretty dang depressed!" I suppose, then, what I really need to decide is, who am I doing this for -- the audience, or me? Do I really need constant feedback from others on my writing and artistic dabblings in order for them to be worth the effort, or can I do this simply for the pleasure it gives me? Good question. It does smack a bit of desperation, doesn't it -- our constant need for validation? Do I really want to let that define who I am and what I do? I don't think so!

In which case, there's only one thing I can do -- put on my big girl panties and deal with it! I can either keep writing and making art for the sheer joy it gives me, regardless of what anyone else has to say, or not say, about it -- or if anyone even sees it, for that matter. Or, I can end up like so many other women I have known, sitting in a chair reading about other people's lives, instead of actually living my own.

"You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it." ~ Nora Ephron