Category — Blogoversary

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

*******

Today my 12th blogoversary intersects with the 200th #Microblog Monday.  I have been writing this blog for 12 years.  12 years!  200 of those posts have been Microblog Monday.  The other several thousand (because I write on average 5 posts per week, 52 weeks per year) have been random mishmash from my clotty uterus to the twins to my extreme love of quokkas to bothering Josh with my feelings at 11 pm.

About 1/4th of my life has been spent writing this site.  Isn’t that mind-blowing?  A quarter of my life.

I have no great wisdom to impart except write.  Keep at it.  The way you amass 12 years is showing up for 12 years.

Thank you for being here.

*******

Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I am currently in a prime number birth year, and this space is in a prime number blogging year: eleven.  Eleven years ago, Josh set up my blog for me.  This place on the web has been his best gift.  (I mean, beyond always supporting my half-baked ideas and giving me space to be myself.)

Thank you, Josh.

I get a little teary when I talk about the Internet because — at least for me — it has done exactly what it was supposed to do.  It connected me.  I was over here, in this tiny bubble on the side of life, and it brought my bubble in contact with millions of other people’s bubbles.  We’ve knocked into each other and drifted apart from one another and stuck together and merged into bigger bubbles from time to time.

Thank you, everyone else.

I don’t have a lot of advice left to give about blogging; it’s really been the same thing year after year.

WAIT.

I have one last thing to say. (Until next year, when I will say another one last thing.)

Don’t look at your stats.  Platforms try to make those numbers easily accessible, but you should do everything in your power to NOT look at them.  At all.  Don’t peek at them from time to time.  Don’t think about them.  Don’t Google what is a good amount of page views.  Don’t think about numbers at all.

Because here’s the thing.  You will be happy if you never look at them.  If you write and assume that there are people quietly reading from their phone, not commenting but still thinking about your words all day.  You will be happy if you don’t know your stats AND you don’t know anyone else’s stats.

I really think Buddha had it right with the Four Noble Truths.  Expectations hinder us.  Expectations throw us off our game.  Expectations make us feel disappointment.

I once dated a guy who tried to teach me this.  We argued about it all the time because I didn’t think you could live without expectations.  I was an expectation-centric person, and the concept of going through life without facts and forecasts was unfathomable.

But I think I get it with this blogging thing.  Every once in a while I need to peek at my stats because someone else needs the number.  And it either makes me feel like shit if the stats are not where I thought they’d be, or the numbers inflate my ego and distract me if they’re higher than I thought they’d be.  So I don’t look at them.  I don’t think about them.  I just write.

And I hope you just write.  There are fewer and fewer of you out there, writing.  I wish you would open your blogs again and jot down a post.  It doesn’t need to be high art.  It doesn’t need to happen with regularity.  It just needs to happen enough that you feel that release of your words going out into the universe.  So that your bubble knocks up against everyone else’s bubble.

I’m floating out here.  I hope you are, too.

9 years ago, I started this blog.  I feel like I’m supposed to say something profound to mark the occasion.  Explain how I’ve kept up almost daily writing for 9 straight years without a break.  But I don’t really know how I’ve done it except show up.

I show up, every day, at this space.  95% of the time, I write something.  And about 80% of the time, I also post something.  I write a lot more than I post.  I don’t know why.  Sometimes I just need to write something and other times I need other people to read what I’ve written in order to release it.  And then there are other times when I have nothing to write but I really need someone to read.  It’s very complicated, this word thing.

*******

Nathan Bransford wrote recently about missing the blogosphere.  One part of me completely understood what he meant.  2007 – 2009 was a different time in the blogging world.  This blogoversary post is a case in point.  On my second blogoversary, even though my readership was less than a third of what it is now, I received 117 comments.  Lots of people were celebrating with me; we celebrated each other’s spaces.  This year, I’m guessing I’ll get around 14 comments.  Maybe?  The way we talk to each other online has changed.

And then another part of me doesn’t miss the blogosphere because it’s all still here.  It’s different, yes, but I always have blog posts to read.  There are always people out there, expressing themselves.  You do need to be out there yourself to find them, but as long as you are still clicking through people’s comment section and finding new bloggers, your feed reader will always be full.

It’s sort of like picking strawberries.  In the middle of the season, the strawberries are easy to pick and you can go home with so many strawberries that you don’t know what to do with all of them.  Some inadvertently end up rotting before you can turn them into jam.  But right now, we’re closer to the end of the season.  The strawberries are a little harder to find, but when you do, they are sweet and bright red.  Maybe you cherish and use them a little better because they took a little more work to find.

Luckily, things have a way of coming back around, so I’m hopeful there will be another beginning, middle, and end of blogging season again and again and again if we continue to replant and tend the rows.

*******

Or maybe you just read that and thought, “Melissa is such a fool!  She thinks this blogging thing has a future.”

I do.

*******

All I know is that I need this space.  That this space completes some missing puzzle piece in my heart, and I need to keep writing it regardless of whether any other blog exists in the future.  It feels like home as much as my home feels like home.  It feels like a part of who I am, how I define myself.

It’s something I need; in the same way that I need hugs and books and flashlights.  None of those things are akin to water or food or air, but they are things I need to feel comfortable.  I need my body to be touched and my mind to be challenged and my fears to assuaged by hugs and books and flashlights.  And somewhere in there, I need a space where I can write that is entirely within my control.

*******

So that’s it.  Not very profound.  Maybe not as eloquent as I’ve been on other blogoversaries.  But it’s what I felt like saying, and I can do that because this blog is a me-shaped space.

Thank you for being here with me in this me-shaped space.

I will tell you a secret.

I think about deleting my blog pretty much every day.  Well, maybe not every day.  But certainly once a week.  If I’m not thinking about deleting my blog, I’m thinking about deleting my Facebook account or my Twitter account.  Every time the idea comes to me, it feels tenable, rational.  And then I start thinking it through and arrive at the same conclusion that I reach every single time.

You guys mean too much to me.

What hurt about leaving college wasn’t the end of classes or because I really loved my apartment.  What hurt was saying goodbye to the people.  We would never be all-together in that space again.  And even if we managed to drag the core group together for a reunion, the supporting characters likely wouldn’t be there.  And even if we could get all the supporting characters AND the core group in one space at the same time — a Sisyphean task — then something else would have changed.  The stores or the professors or the colour of the chairs at the student union’s lake pavilion.

Of course things changed while we were there in college.  Stores closed and our chancellor left to work for President Clinton and two bars burned down.  Friends came and went.  The people I was friends with senior year weren’t really the people I was close to (with few exceptions) freshman year.  But the changes were so tiny that we adjusted accordingly.  We were in the moment.

And being in this blog is about being in the moment.  It’s about recording the moment, but it’s also about interacting with all of you in the moment.  There are changes to the blogosphere every day.  When I look back at whom I was reading daily and whom I emailed with regularly eight years ago, I can only point to a handful of people who are still in my life.  And yet the changes have been so gradual — a tapering off of posts here and an increase in emailing there — that I rarely notice the shift.

I get a taste of how out-of-touch I feel when I go offline for a bit, such as when we’re on vacation.  It takes me a few days to catch up and feel like I know what is happening with you.  I think those small breaks are healthy reminders to how much my relationships here mean to me.

Because if I were to walk away and ever try to come back, it would be like trying to recreate college after graduation.

I could have something entirely different — in the same way that graduate school was entirely different from my undergraduate years — and maybe it would be just as good, but I couldn’t recapture this.

So I remember that, and I don’t hit delete on my blog or social media accounts.  Even when I start freaking out about online privacy.  Even when I get a rash of shitty emails.  Even when I’m filled with a desire to play Hay Day and not read another word; not be challenged to see another person’s point-of-view.  When writing a post feels like one.more.thing.on.my.to.do.list.

Because the truth is, I can’t remember a time when I dedicated the time to writing or reading personal blogs (I make the distinction because I don’t always feel the same way about impersonal media sites) and didn’t emerge from the act feeling as if it were time well-spent.  I may have gone in dragging my heels with a don’t wanna attitude, but I exited my screen time feeling as if I had gotten something off my chest or had a difficult thought make sense or learned something about myself or learned something about someone else or saw the world from a different angle.

So those are my thoughts on my eight year blogoversary.  I have written in this space for eight straight years, for the most part, on a daily basis, even if I don’t post every single thing I write.  2920 days of blogging.  3001 posts.  A pretty good run, nu?

Here’s to another eight years of not deleting my blog.  And in case it isn’t clear, please don’t delete yours.

It is my blogoversary.  For seven years, I have shown up in this space.  I write pretty much daily.  I post about 5 times per week; sometimes more.  I leave about a quarter of my posts in draft; completed but unpublished.  There is no rhyme or reason to what I choose to post vs. what I choose to leave in draft forever.

I’ve seen blogging change a lot.  When I started, blogs were like little lights flickering from mountain top to mountain top, sending a signal across the land.  Now there are millions… billions?… of blogs.  Seven years ago, the blog was it, the end all and be all, the place you could find me.  Now, we’re expected to spread ourselves thinly across multiple platforms, keeping up with dozens of social media sites.  Or we’re encouraged to drop the blog and go ephemeral — throwing our thoughts into the fast-moving rivers of Twitter or Facebook instead of chiseling the words into slow-moving, semi-permanent blog posts.

Over the last seven years, I’ve seen memes come and go, trends take off and fizzle.  I’ve seen the blog be declared dead more times than I can count.

Which brings us to the most important piece of advice I have to give at this point:

Wait.

If you love blogging, if you get what you need simply from putting words on a screen, tune out the “experts” who tell you that you need to do this or that to be “successful.”  What does that even mean anyway?  Why measure yourself by someone else’s definition of a successful blogger?  Those blogging talking heads aren’t Merriam-Webster.  They do not get to define what makes or breaks a blogger.

YOU get to decide that.  We all individually get to decide that.

*******

Every few months, a new trend is floated into the blogosphere.  If you want to have a successful blog, you have to go visual!  You have to have images!  You have to be pinnable!  No… wait… to have a successful blog, you have to be on Twitter!  You have to have a lot of followers!  No… wait… to have a successful blog, you need to make your blog look like every single other space out there, so it doesn’t reflect your personality at all and instead drops you neatly into a single niche that you can present yourself in as an expert.

When all those ideas are floated by me, I nod.  And then I wait.  Because those speakers are anxious to make something happen, to make something go viral or find the next big thing.  And I’m happy to just be trucking along, putting words on a screen.  I get everything I need to get out of blogging; I don’t need to change this space or the way I write.  I like where I put my words.  I like the speed in which they come as well as how long they stick around for readers to find them.

The reality is that if you keep chasing all the things you’re supposed to do with your blog it will cease to be YOUR space in the same way that if you spend your life trying to be like someone else, you will miss you on being you.  I didn’t really get that when my parents would tell me that when I was a kid, and I was moaning that I wasn’t like this person or that person.  But I get it now.

So if Twitter is your thing, go do Twitter.  And if Facebook is your thing, go spend time on Facebook.  If you’re a big fan of hangouts, Google+ is for you.  Images make you happy?  Then there is Pinterest or Instagram.

But I like blogs.  I like reading them, and I like writing one.  So this is what I’m going to do, year after year after year, plodding along with the same thing and waiting when people tell me about the next big thing I need to do in order to be successful since it always changes anyway.

Thank you for being here for seven years.  Some of you have been here since the beginning.  Some of you have found this space quite recently.  And I’m grateful for each and every one of you who pick up my words, consider them, and share your own.